Data Compression

Know more details on the great benefits of data compression. Find out how it functions and what data may be compressed.

The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be deleted at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your info 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 instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm you can find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will work faster. We're able to benefit from the feature although it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we never make accounts on just a single machine like most companies do. There is one more reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data very well and does that very fast, we can also generate several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. By doing this, you'll always be able to restore any content that you erase by mistake.