The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are better for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We can take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always bring back any content that you erase by mistake.