The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of info which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved 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 speedily and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover any content that you could have removed by mistake.

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 known as LZ4, which is much better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this 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. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.