The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An 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 particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies quicker and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover any kind of content that you could have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is a lot better than alternative algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.