The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is much better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to have a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.