The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process the info quick 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 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 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 named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups much more quickly and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore 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 on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is a lot better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need significantly less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.