The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of info which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be removed during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have enough resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In addition to the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies 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 since they take considerably less space compared to conventional backups.