The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are better for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have sufficient resources to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within 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 that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk 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. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups faster and on lower disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover all the content that you could have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, 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. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by accident.