The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are more effective for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process the info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just 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 Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can 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 web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.