The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the info quick 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the innovative ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible 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. That's why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require less space and are generated faster, which enables us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.