The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of data which needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have ample resources to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. Besides the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they need significantly less space than traditional backups.