The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of information that should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded 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 shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action must have adequate resources to be able to process your data quick 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 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to keep a number of daily backups of your files and databases.