The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, so what will be deleted during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process the 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 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared web hosting account shall be made works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains may be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Even though it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content in every single hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We can benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.