Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field as information recorded on hard disk drives is generally compressed in order to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing information and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.