The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of info which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be erased in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have ample resources to be able to process your 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 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can 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 quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We can take full advantage of the feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is another benefit of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you will always be able to recover any content that you delete by accident.