Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field since info recorded on hard disks is often compressed so as to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.