The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of info that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression can 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, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially 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 overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you can always recover any content that you erase by accident.