The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all the content that you may have erased by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you can always recover any content that you delete by mistake.