Data Compression
What kind of info can you compress? Just how does data compression work? Learn more about its space-saving pros.
Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data stored on HDDs is typically compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. 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 employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a cloud hosting account with us because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies more speedily and on less disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you may have erased by mistake.