The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process the info quick enough. An 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 rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies faster and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover the content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's far better than various other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.