Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information requires considerably less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find many different 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 erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace 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 entire code.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We can benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you can always recover any content that you delete by mistake.