The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, so what will be erased in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more effective for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action must have ample resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.