The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have ample resources in order to be able to process your info fast 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 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each website hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost any kind of site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.