The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action must have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just 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 cloud web hosting platform where your cloud hosting account will be created uses the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the whole content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is much better than all other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. This is why sites running on a platform which uses LZ4 compression perform faster as the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need much less space and they are generated quicker, which enables us to keep several daily backups of your files and databases.