The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information 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 kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have enough resources to be able to process your data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is much better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially 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 sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take significantly less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.