The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of information that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are better for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account is created works by using the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The gains may be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate numerous daily backups of the whole content in each web hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created much quicker without loading the servers.