The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are better for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups quicker and on less disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore all of the content that you may have erased by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Besides the improved performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they take a lot less space compared to standard backups.