Data Compression
What kind of information is it possible to compress? How exactly does data compression function? Discover more about its space-saving pros.
Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field as information located on HDDs is generally compressed so as to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
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Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new
cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hdd. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The
semi-dedicated server plans which we supply are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is better than any other algorithm available in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing web content. This is valid particularly when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and as a result, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We're able to benefit from this feature although it needs quite a considerable amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a wide range of powerful servers working together and we do not make accounts on just a single machine like the majority of companies do. There is a further benefit of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data rather well and does that extremely fast, we can also make multiple daily backups of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you can always recover any content that you delete by accident.