The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any website located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm these days 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 and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.