The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of data which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the info fast 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 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require significantly less space and are generated a lot faster, which allows us to store multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.