Data Compression
What info could you compress? Just how does data compression function? Learn more about its space-saving benefits.
The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of info that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms which are more effective for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
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Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new
website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a couple of daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.