The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of info that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site located on a server that uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is a lot better than all other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and are generated faster, which enables us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.