The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be removed throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are better for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, so the server performing the action needs to have enough resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account with us because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all of the content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is a lot better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.