The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of info which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.