Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field since information located on hard drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process employs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm available 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. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.