The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are more effective for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process the info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a number of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than all the other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. That's why websites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep need less space and they are generated faster, which enables us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.