The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account is generated employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Even though it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which 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 positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much more quickly without loading the servers.