The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, so what will be removed throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have ample resources to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge 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 since this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.
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 positively the best one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data a lot 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 Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they'll take much less space than regular backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.