Data Compression
Learn exactly what Data Compression is and find out how it could affect your web sites and the experience of your site visitors.
Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field since information located on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
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Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new
cloud web hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.