The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, so what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are better for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any website hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is much faster, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they take considerably less space compared to standard backups.