Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field since data kept on hard disks is usually compressed to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency based upon the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process consumes a lot of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than info can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce a couple of daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.