The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the data fast 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 particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies much quicker and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover all content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's much better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.