Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data takes considerably less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored using the same amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from the feature although it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you'll always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.