The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are better for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than information can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website located on a server which uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from the feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.