Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the internet hosting field since data kept on hard drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method requires a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code may 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 work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a number of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.