Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field as information filed on hard drives is often compressed to take less space. You'll find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method requires plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies more rapidly and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all of the content that you may have removed by mistake.