The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a cloud web hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies quicker and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have removed by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will accelerate every Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the large number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 enables us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take much less space than regular backups and will be created much more quickly without loading the servers.