The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have enough resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential 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 Web Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover all of the content that you could have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting 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 distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. 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 large number of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them because they take a lot less space compared to traditional backups.