Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the internet hosting field because data located on hard drives is typically compressed in order to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process requires a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code may 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 employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can supercharge the performance of any website hosted in a shared website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies much more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you may have deleted by accident.