The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be erased 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 its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site hosted on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient 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 disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate any site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.