The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process the info fast enough. An 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 rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.