The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, so what will be erased throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take much less space than regular backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.