The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be erased during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. One simple 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 Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's far better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That is why Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they are generated faster, which enables us to have multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.