The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are better for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just 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 Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, especially 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 performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that 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 certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables 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 much quicker without loading the servers.