The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are more effective for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally 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 your data fast 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 rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a cloud web hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups faster and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover the content that you may have deleted by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with several clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they need considerably less space compared to conventional backups.