The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information that should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action must have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is a lot better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent 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 HDD. This is why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.