The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action must have ample resources to be able to process your data 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 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than information can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site hosted on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, you will be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all 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 website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with several clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to store them as they take considerably less space than conventional backups.