The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be removed at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet 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 reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which 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 create backups faster 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. In this way, we can always restore any content that you could have removed by mistake.