The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, so what will be erased during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have ample resources to be able to process the info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved 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 generate backup copies faster and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover the content that you may have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's far better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.