The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of info which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are better for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

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 among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will speed up every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.