The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of data which needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted 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 data and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are better for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action must have enough resources to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a cloud website hosting account with us as not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore any kind of content that you may have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which 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 exceeds any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is another reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.