The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all the content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We're able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.