The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be erased in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are better for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have ample resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all the content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is far better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.