Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field as information kept on hard disks is generally compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This process employs plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.