Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field because info located on HDDs is typically compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform that runs using the advanced ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, which is much better than all the other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 a lot faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard drive. This is why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep need significantly less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.