The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A 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 Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function at a higher speed. We're able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that speedily, 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'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.