The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be erased throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have enough resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any website located on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We are able to take advantage of the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.