Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field as information kept on hard disk drives is generally compressed to take less space. You'll find many different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method consumes a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code may 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 which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account with us because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups much more quickly and on less disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all the content that you could have deleted by mistake.