Data Compression

Learn exactly what Data Compression is and see how it can affect your sites as well as the experience of your visitors.

The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more effective for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud web hosting account will be made employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also quicker. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Even though it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content in every single hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.