Data Compression

Learn precisely what Data Compression is and discover how it may affect your web sites and the experience of your visitors.

The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account is made uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The benefits can be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Even though it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every web hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available 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 more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We can take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you can always restore any content that you erase by accident.