The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover all the content that you may have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that more rapidly 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 enabled will function faster. We are able to take full advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always recover any content that you delete by accident.