The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, so what will be erased in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more effective for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by mistake.