The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, so what will be erased during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process the 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 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce a number of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.