Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field since data recorded on hard disk drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast 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 will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard drive. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every website hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.