Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will require much less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have enough power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hard drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but also their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.