The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, so what will be removed throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site located on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce several daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. Together with the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you could recover any deleted content with just a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they take considerably less space than traditional backups.