Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info filed on hard disk drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. This process requires plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which 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 allows us to generate backup copies at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all content that you could have erased by mistake.