Data Compression

Learn precisely what Data Compression is and find out how it can affect your sites as well as the experience of your site visitors.

The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have sufficient resources to be able to process the data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside 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 will be made works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.