The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a hosting
account with us as not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies quicker and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all of the content that you may have erased by accident.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting
account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's far better than alternative algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. Because of this websites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and they're generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.