The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be removed throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have ample resources to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive 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 ZFS file system which operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web 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 from our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they need considerably less space than standard backups.