The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your hosting account shall be made uses the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The gains can be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need a lot less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.