Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have enough power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.