The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, so what will be deleted throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have adequate resources to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal 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 backup copies faster and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is significantly better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as 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 that we keep take less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.