The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of info that should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action must have ample resources in order to be able to process the info 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 actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is a lot better than all other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require much less space and they are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.