The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have enough resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive 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 Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly 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 Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's a lot better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. Because of this sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need a lot less space and they're generated faster, which allows us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.