The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing 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 info and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are better for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's a lot better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of your files and databases.