The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression shall 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 shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action should have enough resources to be able to process the data quick 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 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the exceptional ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.