The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more efficient for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the 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 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet 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. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.