The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data which should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are better for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. A 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 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.