The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the data 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 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each website hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We can take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by mistake.