The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that 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 info and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have ample resources to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups more speedily and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any content that you may have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We can benefit from this feature regardless of the fact that 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 create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.