The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are better for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, which means that the server executing the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process the data fast 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 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be generated uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to 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 a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.