The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased during the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are better for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action should have enough resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your hosting account shall be made employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm named LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm available on the market in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We're able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There's an additional advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. That way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.