The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, so what will be deleted throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action must have enough resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very 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

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.