The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of info which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have adequate resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in 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 internet hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.
Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that exceeds any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and as a result, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work at a higher speed. We are able to take advantage of the feature despite of the fact that it requires quite a large amount of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on a single machine like many companies do. There is a further advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backup copies of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for a month. This way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.