The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of information which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, so what will be deleted at the time of 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 will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action should have ample resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We are able to benefit from the feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a huge number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you can always bring back any content that you delete by accident.