The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of info which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process the info quick enough. An 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover the content that you could have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they need significantly less space than conventional backups.