The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have adequate resources to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple 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 instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a shared website hosting account with us because not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover the content that you may have deleted by mistake.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We are able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's another benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.