The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

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

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is significantly better than all the 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 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take significantly less space and they are generated faster, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.