The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of info which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed throughout 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 shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have ample resources to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is a lot better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly 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 hard disk drive. That's why websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and they're generated quicker, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.