The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression shall 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 the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are better for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An 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 particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.