The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every site hosted on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a number of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.