The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action should have plenty of resources to be able to process the info quick enough. One simple 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 instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover all the content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is far better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need a lot less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of your files and databases.