The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process your 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 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We can benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's one more reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.