Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information will need less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a cloud web hosting account with us because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies more quickly and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover the content that you may have deleted by accident.