Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored on the same amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We can benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. In this way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.