The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have sufficient 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 consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account will be created employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which many other file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The benefits can be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content in each and every Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs on the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is far better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent 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 that uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and are generated faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.