Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data will need less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.