The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be removed during 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 identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We can benefit from this feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.