The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, so what will be deleted 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 will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process the data 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 particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less 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 kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet 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 with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using a considerable amount of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they take significantly less space compared to traditional backups.