Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field because info recorded on HDDs is generally compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process employs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're 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 will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every website located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.