The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information which should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential 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 Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it 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, which is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover any kind of content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need significantly less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.