The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, so what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have enough resources to be able to process your info quick 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 as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.
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 is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will boost every site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.