Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field since info recorded on hard drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. 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. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.