Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new web hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than data can be read from a hard drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any site located on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a couple of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.