The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of info that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be erased during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. An 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that 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 require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence 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 that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's far better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.