Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information located on HDDs is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved 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 enables us to create backup copies much quicker and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore all of the content that you could have deleted by accident.