The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be removed in the course of 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 the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive 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 Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared web hosting
account will be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server
plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We're able to take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on just a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - considering that it compresses data really well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. That way, you'll always be able to bring back any content that you erase by mistake.