The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every site located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is much quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them as they need considerably less space than ordinary backups.