The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of info which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are better for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have plenty of resources in order 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 how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than info can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a couple of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will boost every site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they will take a reduced amount of space than standard backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.