The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store 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 Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker 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 a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not an issue for our platform as it consists of multiple clusters working together. Along with the superior performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you can restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them because they need a lot less space than standard backups.