The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of info that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have enough resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a hosting account with us because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk 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 backup copies much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover the content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is far better than 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 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.