The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary 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. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action must have adequate resources to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential 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 Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to benefit from the feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.