The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so what will be deleted at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality shall 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 information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources to be able to process your info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any site stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.