The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups faster and on less disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore all the content that you may have removed by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing website content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform because it consists of a lot of clusters working together. Along with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them as they take a lot less space than standard backups.