The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data which has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality shall 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 info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action must have sufficient resources to be able to process the info 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 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups quicker and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is significantly better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly 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 employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have several daily backups of your files and databases.