Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info needs less disk space than the original one, so additional content might be stored using identical amount of space. You will find many different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient 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 actual code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms employed by other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD 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. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backups faster and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover all of the content that you could have removed by accident.