The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have ample resources to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared website hosting account is generated works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's a lot better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.