The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so what will be deleted during 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 will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies a lot faster and on lower disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover the content that you could have removed by accident.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account with our company, you can experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that's behind our advanced cloud hosting platform. What distinguishes LZ4 from all the other algorithms out there is that it has a higher compression ratio and it is much faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed info can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that's not an issue for our platform since it consists of numerous clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to restore any deleted content with a couple of clicks. The backup copies are available for a whole month and we can afford to keep them since they take significantly less space than conventional backups.