The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have adequate resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

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