The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, so what will be erased throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker 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 quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take advantage of the feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.