Data Compression
Learn exactly what Data Compression is and find out how it may affect your websites along with the experience of your visitors.
Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field since data kept on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
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Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new
shared hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any website located on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backups of the full content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The
semi-dedicated hosting plans that we offer are created on a powerful cloud platform which runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm called LZ4 that is superior to any other algorithm on the market in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that faster than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk and owing to this, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work faster. We're able to benefit from the feature regardless of the fact that it needs quite a large amount of CPU processing time because our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we never create accounts on a single machine like most companies do. There's an additional benefit of using LZ4 - since it compresses data rather well and does that speedily, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for an entire month. This way, you can always restore any content that you delete by accident.
