The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of info that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, so what will be removed during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, 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 information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost any kind of website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.