The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are better for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all content that you could have deleted by mistake.
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 certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can 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 website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take a reduced amount of space than regular backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.