The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than info can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored 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 backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of this feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.