The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's much better than various other algorithms regarding 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 HDD. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of your files and databases.