The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are better for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take much less space than regular backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.