The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have enough resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done 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. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore the content that you may have erased by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform that runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is much better than alternative algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. This is why sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they are generated faster, which allows us to keep several daily backups of all your files and databases.