Data Compression
What kind of information is it possible to compress? How exactly does data compression function? Learn more about its space-saving benefits.
Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field since data recorded on hard drives is generally compressed to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all content that you may have erased by accident.