The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have sufficient resources to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We're able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large 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 vast majority of companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.