Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info kept on HDDs is usually compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard disk drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of any site hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.