The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of info which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, so what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site located on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken any Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.