The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so what will be removed during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have ample 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 just how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much more quickly and on less disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover all content that you could have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is way quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you could restore any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them as they take considerably less space than standard backups.