What type of information could you compress? Just how does data compression function? Read more about its space-saving benefits.
Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies much quicker and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all content that you could have deleted by accident.
In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account with our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud Internet hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has a better compression ratio and it is considerably faster, in particular when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even faster than uncompressed information can be read from a hard disk drive, so your Internet sites will perform faster. The higher speed is at the expense of using lots of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it consists of multiple clusters working together. In combination with the superior performance, you will also have multiple daily backup copies at your disposal, so you'll be able to recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backup copies are available for an entire month and we can afford to keep them since they take a lot less space than standard backups.