The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, so what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's among the best algorithms out there and certainly the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it can uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will quicken every website that runs on a platform where the algorithm is enabled. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the numerous clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backup copies of your content every day and save them for one month as they'll take much less space than regular backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.