Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field since information kept on HDDs is typically compressed in order to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much more rapidly and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore any kind of content that you may have erased by mistake.