The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be erased during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. An 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 instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore any kind of content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker 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 enabled will work faster. We're able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.