The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info which should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your data fast 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 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover any content that you could have erased by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We're able to benefit from this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is a further reward of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also generate several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. This way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.