The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of info which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so what will be erased throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are better for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process your data 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 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, 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 Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's a lot better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is the reason why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.