Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field as data stored on hard drives is often compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is substantially faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.