The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, so what will be erased during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups more speedily and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore any kind of content that you may have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data at a higher speed than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate any kind of Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that's provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for one month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be created considerably quicker without loading the servers.