Data Compression
Learn exactly what Data Compression is and see how it can affect your websites along with the experience of your site visitors.
Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the web hosting field since info filed on hard disks is generally compressed to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method requires a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
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Data Compression in Website Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your
website hosting account shall be made works by using the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content such as website files. Even though it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each website hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate numerous daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your
semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform that is run on the leading-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm known as LZ4, that's much better than all other algorithms with regard to compression ratio and speed. The gain is apparent particularly when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much quicker than other algorithms, but it is also quicker in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk drive. That's why sites running on a platform which employs LZ4 compression perform faster since the algorithm is most effective when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts which we keep take a lot less space and they are generated a lot quicker, which allows us to have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases.