The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info which should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be removed during the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process the info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared website hosting account shall be made employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Although it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every site hosted on our servers will be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the entire content in each Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is significantly better than all the other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is the reason why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need significantly less space and they're generated faster, which enables us to keep multiple daily backups of all your files and databases.