The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, so what will be erased during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are better for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the info quick enough. An 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every site located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not 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 supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very 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 whole month. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.