The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of info which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased in the course 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 its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud web hosting account is made works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a large number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last backup which we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is a lot better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant 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 disk. This is the reason why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more 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 allows us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.