The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action should have adequate resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative 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 outperforms any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We're able to take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.