The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information that should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have adequate resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared website hosting account is generated works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is greater in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it's also faster. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Although it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce numerous daily backups of the whole content in each Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.