The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of data which needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An 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 as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work quicker. We are able to take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.