The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will quicken any website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.