The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly 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 websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.