The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have adequate resources to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared website hosting account shall be created employs the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it's also considerably quicker. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the full content in every single Internet 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 as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is much better than alternative algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why Internet sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require less space and they are generated quicker, which allows us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.