The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, so what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use 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 drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform because it consists of multiple clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they take significantly less space compared to ordinary backups.