The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be deleted during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process your info 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 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to take advantage of this feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is an additional advantage 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 can always bring back any content that you delete by mistake.