Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field since info kept on hard drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process uses plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate a couple of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.