Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field since info recorded on hard disk drives is typically compressed to take less space. There are many different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The method consumes plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a shared web hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover the content that you could have removed by mistake.