The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of data which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be deleted in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms which are better for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have enough resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every website hosted on a server which uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that much faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function quicker. We're able to take advantage of the feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses many powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There is another advantage of using LZ4 - considering the fact that it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also make multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you will always be able to recover any content that you erase by accident.