The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process your info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your website hosting account is generated employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains can be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content in every single web hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.