The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be removed at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process your data fast 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 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account will be made employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from the feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you can always recover any content that you erase by mistake.