The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be erased in the course of 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 shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are better for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have ample resources to be able to process your info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a web hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies faster and on lower disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all the content that you could have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of your files and databases.