The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done 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 afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is way quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take considerably less space compared to traditional backups.