The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. A 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 Shared Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account is made uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate numerous daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We're able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.