The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account with us since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups faster and on lower disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially 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 HDD. That's why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.