The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple 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 rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any 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 disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and 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 and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.