Data Compression
Understand more details on the benefits of data compression. Discover how it works along with what data may be compressed.
Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information recorded on HDDs is generally compressed to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. This method requires a lot of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. 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.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account with us because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always restore any kind of content that you could have removed by accident.