The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of data which should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. An 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than 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 because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We can benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.