Data Compression
Learn exactly what Data Compression is and find out how it can affect your web sites and the experience of your site visitors.
The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of info which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be erased in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms which are better for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
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Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new
cloud website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any website located on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a number of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.
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Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites in a
semi-dedicated server account from our firm, you'll be able to experience the advantages of LZ4 - the powerful compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which is behind our advanced cloud web hosting platform. What differentiates LZ4 from all other algorithms out there is that it has an improved compression ratio and it is considerably quicker, particularly when it comes to uncompressing web content. It does that even quicker than uncompressed information can be read from a hard drive, so your Internet sites will perform better. The higher speed comes at the expense of using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform as it consists of a large number of clusters working together. In combination with the improved performance, you'll also have multiple daily backups at your disposal, so you will be able to recover any deleted content with just a few clicks. The backups are available for a whole month and we can afford to store them since they need significantly less space compared to traditional backups.