The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have ample resources to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard disk drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any site hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the state-of-the-art ZFS file system. The aforementioned uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, that is far better than other algorithms in terms of compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. Because of this websites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform better since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. website content. One more advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep take a lot less space and they're generated a lot faster, which enables us to keep a couple of daily backups of all your files and databases.