The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, so what will be removed during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud hosting account is made uses the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The benefits are significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce a number of daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can benefit from the feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by mistake.