The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process the 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 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, 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 performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web 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. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken any site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated considerably faster without loading the servers.