The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted throughout 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 the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential 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 Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly 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 overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We're able to benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.