The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information that has to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing info, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have ample resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.