The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information which should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. An 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 rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more speedily and on less disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all of the content that you may have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take much less space than regular backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.