Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field since data kept on hard drives is generally compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process employs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than info can be read from a hdd. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with many other file systems.