The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are better for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud hosting account shall be generated uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. While it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a large number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect 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 that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really 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 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by mistake.