The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of info which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so 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 information and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have enough resources to be able to process your info fast 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 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, 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 drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that 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 faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they need significantly less space than ordinary backups.