The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have ample resources to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any site hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We're able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.