The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, so the server executing the action must have enough resources to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, particularly 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 websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the 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 fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, 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 web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is considerably faster, particularly with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Together with the better performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them because they need significantly less space than traditional backups.