The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, so what will be deleted 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 content and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process your data quick enough. An 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 as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your hosting account will be made employs the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Although it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the whole content in each Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is a lot better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. This is the reason why websites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and are generated faster, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.