The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, so what will be erased throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are better for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action should have enough resources to be able to process your data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every website located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We're able to take advantage of the feature although it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.