The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be removed throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are better for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action must have enough resources to be able to process your data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, that is much better than other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. Because of this websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better as the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require a lot less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.