The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. An 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you can always recover any content that you erase by mistake.