The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are better for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform as it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Besides the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they take significantly less space than ordinary backups.