The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so what will be deleted during the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, 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 which are more effective for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably 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 quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than alternative algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly 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. Because of this websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need much less space and are generated quicker, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.