The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of info which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have enough resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every website hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will speed up every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.