The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be erased during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site located on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost any Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.