The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be erased at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process your info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be generated works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content in every single Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We are able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's a further benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.