The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information that should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression will 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 identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action should have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet 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 quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud website 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 very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to take full advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's a further advantage of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.