The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be erased at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action should have ample resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It's one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard drive if it were uncompressed. Thus, using LZ4 will quicken any Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, which is provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. Furthermore, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they'll take a smaller amount of space than standard backups and will be generated considerably quicker without loading the servers.