The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, so what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.
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 among the best algorithms out there and definitely 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. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken every Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, which is provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and keep them for one month as they'll take much less space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.