The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be removed at the time of the compression can 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 can find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process the info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data at a faster rate than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost any kind of website that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.