The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of info which has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more effective for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account with us since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies faster and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take significantly less space compared to conventional backups.