The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, so what will be deleted during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are better for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will accelerate every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.