The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are better for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have sufficient resources to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies much quicker and on lower disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all content that you could have deleted by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is way quicker, especially with regard to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed data can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not an issue for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you'll also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them since they take considerably less space compared to conventional backups.