The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be removed throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your data 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 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We can take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.