The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, so what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have ample resources to be able to process your data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function quicker. We're able to take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.