The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process your info fast 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 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies more rapidly and on reduced disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover the content that you may have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's significantly better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take significantly less space and are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.