The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression can 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, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are better for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much quicker, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data 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 because 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'll be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them because they take a lot less space than standard backups.