Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info located on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method needs a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than info can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each site hosted 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 produce a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.