The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, so what will be erased 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 content and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are better for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have ample resources to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available 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 drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is an additional advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you erase by accident.