The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have adequate resources to be able to process the data fast 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 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account with us because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore any content that you could have erased by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that's a lot better than other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they are generated a lot faster, which enables us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.