The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, so what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have ample resources to be able to process the info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups faster and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore any kind of content that you may have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better 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 a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We can take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.