The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have adequate resources to be able to process the info quick 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 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any website hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet 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 many powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.