The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be generated employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also quicker. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make a large number of daily backups of the whole content in every single web hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.
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's one of 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 faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken every website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.