The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be removed throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your data fast enough. One 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 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account is generated uses the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it's also considerably faster. The gains may be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. While it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the whole content in every single hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.