Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field as data kept on hard disks is typically compressed in order to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.