The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of info that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are better for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing 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 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 Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies a lot faster and on less disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all the content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take less space and they are generated quicker, which enables us to have multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.