Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field as information filed on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. The process employs plenty of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.