The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, 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 data and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info fast 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 rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially 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 performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, 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. This way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.