The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of information that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, so what will be removed at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, so the server performing the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your cloud web hosting account is generated works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is better in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains are significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate numerous daily backups of the full content in each hosting account, so if you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we supply are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm available in terms of speed and compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function faster. We can take advantage of the feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we don't create accounts on a single machine like the majority of companies do. There's an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that speedily, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for a whole month. By doing this, you will always be able to restore any content that you delete by mistake.