The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be deleted at the time of 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 identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have plenty of resources to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account with us since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by alternative 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, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies much more quickly and on less disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all the content that you could have erased by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that's a lot better than various other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they are generated faster, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.