The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more effective for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info quick 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 instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will boost every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.