The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process the data fast 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 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. That way, using LZ4 will speed up any kind of website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, which is provided by the large number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and have them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be created much faster without loading the servers.