The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential 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 Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly 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 performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We're able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by mistake.