The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, so what will be erased in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are better for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must 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 just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, 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. By doing this, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.