Data Compression
Learn precisely what Data Compression is and discover how it could affect your websites and the experience of your visitors.
Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field since info stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method uses plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
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Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the
cloud web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your
semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm named LZ4, which is far better than other algorithms when it comes to compression ratio and speed. The gain is visible especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. That's why sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform faster because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and are generated faster, which allows us to store a number of daily backups of all your files and databases.