Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed information needs less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support this feature. An example how information 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 saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any Internet site hosted in a web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies more quickly and on less disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover any kind of content that you could have erased by mistake.