Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field because data filed on hard disk drives is generally compressed to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process employs plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.