The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of data which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action must have sufficient resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple 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 instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your cloud hosting account shall be made works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which some other file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm called LZ4 that surpasses any other algorithm out there in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed since LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very fast, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always bring back any content that you delete by mistake.