The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. An 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 instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any website located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We can benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very 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. By doing this, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.