Data Compression
What type of information could you compress? How exactly does data compression work? Learn more about its space-saving benefits.
Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the web hosting field as data kept on HDDs is usually compressed to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration 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 Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the
website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your
semi-dedicated server account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is among the best algorithms out there and definitely the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing website content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data a lot faster than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. This way, using LZ4 will accelerate any Internet site that runs on a platform where the algorithm is present. The high performance requires lots of CPU processing time, that is provided by the great number of clusters working together as a part of our platform. In addition, LZ4 allows us to generate several backups of your content every day and keep them for a month as they'll take a reduced amount of space than typical backups and will be generated much faster without loading the servers.