The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. One 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 particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be created uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.