The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be erased in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are better for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies faster and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore the content that you may have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's one more benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.