The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, so what will be erased in the course of the compression can 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, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are better for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have plenty of resources to be able to process the info 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 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost any website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.