The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, so what will be erased during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are better for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have enough resources to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the 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 influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, especially when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they take considerably less space than conventional backups.