Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data filed on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.