The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of info which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are better for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have adequate 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 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is a lot better than all the other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That is why Internet sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they're generated a lot faster, which allows us to have a number of daily backups of your files and databases.