The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, so what will be deleted during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are better for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process the data fast 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 actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, 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, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is significantly better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take significantly less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.