The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, so 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 the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are better for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process the info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any website located on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We can benefit from this feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.