The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is much better than other algorithms regarding 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 faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is the reason why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take much less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.