Data Compression
Learn exactly what Data Compression is and see how it may affect your web sites as well as the experience of your website visitors.
The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
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Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a
cloud hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have erased by mistake.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The
semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that 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 since LZ4 does that more quickly than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, Internet sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We can take advantage of this feature although it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a number of powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.