Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the internet hosting field because information kept on hard disks is often compressed so as to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process employs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to 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 called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform since it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backups much more rapidly and on less disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover any content that you may have deleted by mistake.