The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted at the time 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 will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a cloud website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all content that you may have removed by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them because they need considerably less space compared to traditional backups.