Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have ample power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.