Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You will find many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The method uses a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.