Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field since info kept on HDDs is often compressed in order to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method needs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems employ 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 since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a number of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The ZFS file system which runs on the cloud platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it will uncompress data much faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will quicken any Internet site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is present. This high performance requires plenty of CPU processing time, that's provided by the multitude of clusters working together as part of our platform. What's more, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and have them for a month as they will take much less space than standard backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.