The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted during the compression can 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, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are better for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, so the server performing the action must have ample resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is made uses the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The gains can be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every web hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup which we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting 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, which is significantly better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.