The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, so what will be deleted throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have enough resources to be able to process your info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any website hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that 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 most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up any website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.