The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be removed during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more effective for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. A simple 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 Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.