Data Compression

What kind of data is it possible to compress? How exactly does data compression work? Learn more about its space-saving advantages.

Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information stored on HDDs is usually compressed so as to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

Your semi-dedicated server account will be created on a cloud platform which runs using the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that is much better than alternative algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is noticeable particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much 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 since the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. An additional advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take much less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to have several daily backups of all your files and databases.