The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, so what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than information can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.
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 known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web 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 drive and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work at a higher speed. We're able to benefit from the feature although it needs quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really 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 30 days. In this way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by accident.