The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be deleted throughout the compression can 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, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be made works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The benefits will be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is far better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.