Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field since information filed on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process consumes a lot of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any website hosted in a web hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms used by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all content that you could have deleted by accident.