The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, so what will be removed throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your hosting account will be made works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains are significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content in each Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is a lot better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.