The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. A 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 instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web 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 innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is a lot better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they are generated faster, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.