The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, so what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.

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 uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We are able to take advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always restore any content that you erase by accident.