The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, so what will be removed throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are better for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have plenty of 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 sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, 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 sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the innovative ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is a lot better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to have multiple daily backups of your files and databases.