The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, so the server performing the action needs to have enough 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 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the exceptional ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website hosted on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative 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 works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of this feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.