The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more effective for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, 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 drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.