Data Compression
What kind of info can you compress? How exactly does data compression work? Discover more about its space-saving benefits.
Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information located on hard disks is generally compressed so as to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
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Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a
cloud web hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies a lot faster and on less disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore the content that you could have erased by accident.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The
semi-dedicated server plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm you will find in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that a lot faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will function at a higher speed. We're able to take advantage of this feature despite of the fact that it needs quite a lot of CPU processing time because our platform uses a large number of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on a single machine like a lot of companies do. There is an additional reward of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. That way, you can always restore any content that you erase by mistake.