The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action must have sufficient resources to be able to process the info 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 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of multiple clusters working together. In addition to the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need considerably less space than ordinary backups.