The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are better for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store 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 Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web 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 disk drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.