The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info which has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore the content that you may have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient 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 disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken any website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a 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 one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.