The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary 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. There're various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups faster and on reduced 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. This way, we can always recover any content that you may have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken any Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.