The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, so what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded 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 will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can benefit from the feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. In this way, you can always restore any content that you delete by mistake.