Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field as information filed on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.