The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared website hosting account will be made employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it's also faster. The benefits can be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content in every single Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.