The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have ample resources to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less 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 kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We can benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by accident.