The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be erased during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also 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 owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies faster and on lower disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's another reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, 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. That way, you can always recover any content that you erase by mistake.