The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, so what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have ample resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud hosting account shall be generated employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The gains can be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a large number of daily backups of the entire content in every single Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you erase by accident.