The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of information that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are better for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have enough resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively 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 higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will accelerate every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.