The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of data that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your web hosting account will be generated works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The benefits can be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Even though it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is far better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and they are generated faster, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.