Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field because data recorded on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server has 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 consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.