The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have enough resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared website hosting account will be made works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The gains can be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Even though it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days 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 a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.