The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased during the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be made uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content like website files. While it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers will be better. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We can take advantage of this feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.