The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of info which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have ample resources in order to be able to process the data quick 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 rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account shall be created uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains can be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate numerous daily backups of the full content in every single Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.