The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be removed 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 info and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are better for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the 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 cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is far better than 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 quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why websites 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 require much less space and are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.