The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed in the course of 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 the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

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 best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will boost every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.