The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of info which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be deleted at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have adequate resources to be able to process your data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just 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 Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server 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, that's a lot better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require significantly less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to store several daily backups of all your files and databases.