The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are better for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm you will 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 a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by accident.