The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, so what will be erased during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are better for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action should have ample resources to be able to process your info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is significantly better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.