The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing 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 later on, in the first case the data and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your info quick 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 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud website hosting account with us because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups a lot faster and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all the content that you may have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We can take full advantage of the feature although it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data very well and does that extremely fast, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you will always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.