Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field because info kept on HDDs is often compressed in order to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process needs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly 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 quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.