The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be removed during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, so the server performing the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process the info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies much more quickly and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore the content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.