Data Compression
Learn precisely what Data Compression is and see how it may affect your web sites along with the experience of your website visitors.
Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the web hosting field since data kept on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, so a web 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 sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
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Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the
shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
Your
semi-dedicated server account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs on the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The aforementioned 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 faster than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a HDD. That's why Internet sites running on a platform that employs LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. web content. A further advantage of using LZ4 is that the backups of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep require much less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which enables us to store a number of daily backups of your files and databases.