Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field since data filed on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process uses a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance 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 Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems use as 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 faster than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each site hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.