The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be removed during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any site hosted in a shared website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover any kind of content that you could have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you can find 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 a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and because of this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of the feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. By doing this, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.