The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased during the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action must have sufficient resources to be able to process your info quick enough. A 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups more speedily and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all of the content that you could have erased by mistake.