The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of information which should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly 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 drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by mistake.