The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are better for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info 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 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 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 named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot 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 allows us to create backups quicker and on reduced disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We can take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's another reward of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.