The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple 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 Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared web hosting account will be made uses the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Although it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce numerous daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is significantly better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent 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. This is the reason why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of your files and databases.