The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process your data 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 as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your hosting account shall be made employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The gains may be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make multiple daily backups of the full content in each hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is significantly better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That is why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take less space and are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.