The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, 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 afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have enough resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, 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, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take 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 stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.