The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be deleted at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process your data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is a lot better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant 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. That's why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to have several daily backups of your files and databases.