Data Compression
What kind of data can you compress? Just how does data compression function? Find out more about its space-saving advantages.
Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will take less disk space than the original one, so extra content could be stored using identical amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.
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Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the
shared web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on the cloud platform where your
semi-dedicated hosting account will be created uses a powerful compression algorithm called LZ4. It is one of the best algorithms out there and positively the most efficient one when it comes to compressing and uncompressing web content, as its ratio is very high and it'll uncompress data quicker than the same data can be read from a hard disk drive if it were uncompressed. In this way, using LZ4 will boost any kind of site that runs on a platform where this algorithm is enabled. The high performance requires a lot of CPU processing time, that is provided by the great number of clusters working together as part of our platform. In addition to that, LZ4 makes it possible for us to generate several backups of your content every day and save them for a month as they will take much less space than typical backups and will be created considerably faster without loading the servers.