The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action needs to have ample resources to be able to process the data fast 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 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a shared website hosting account with us since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much more rapidly and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than various other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly 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 HDD. That's why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need a lot less space and are generated quicker, which enables us to keep a number of daily backups of your files and databases.