The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are better for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have plenty of resources to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they take a lot less space compared to standard backups.