Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information will take less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 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 provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market 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 more rapidly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We can benefit from the feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. In this way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.