The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info which has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to 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 consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account will be created uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is greater in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The gains can be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce numerous daily backups of the whole content in every single hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.