The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info which should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be removed throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have plenty of resources to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your hosting account will be generated works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's significantly better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 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 sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take significantly less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.