The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info which needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within 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 web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a web hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies much quicker and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore any kind of content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's far better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and are generated quicker, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of your files and databases.