The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential 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 Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account is created employs the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a large number of daily backups of the entire content in every single Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can benefit from the feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's another advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you can always restore any content that you erase by accident.