The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive 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 Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker 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 very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is significantly better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and are generated a lot faster, which enables us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.