The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account is generated uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so should you delete something by mistake, the last backup which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of 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 much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 enables us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take a smaller amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much quicker without loading the servers.