The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of information that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more effective for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account is generated works by using the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is better in a number of 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 a lot faster. The benefits are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. While it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so should you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much quicker, particularly with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In addition to the superior performance, you'll have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space than ordinary backups.