The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, so what will be erased in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, so the server performing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than information can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens 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 definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will speed up any site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.