The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be deleted 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 data and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared website hosting account shall be generated employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
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 website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.