The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are better for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have plenty of resources to be able to process your info fast enough. One 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 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups quicker and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore all content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.