The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of information which should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your info fast enough. One 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 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account is created uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The gains can be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the full content in every single Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken any site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.