The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so what will be deleted at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.