The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing 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 content and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more effective for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What separates LZ4 from all of the other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is way quicker, in particular with regard to uncompressing website content. It does that even faster than uncompressed data can be read from a hard drive, so your websites will perform better. The higher speed is at the expense of using plenty of CPU processing time, that's not a problem for our platform since it consists of a large number of clusters working together. Besides the better performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you will be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backups are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they take a lot less space than conventional backups.