Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the web hosting field since data located on hard disk drives is often compressed in order to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process needs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than 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 will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than info can be read from a hard disk. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any website located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce multiple daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.