The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order 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 just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each site stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.