The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive 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 Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a number of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to take full advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by accident.