Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is very important in the web hosting field since info kept on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This method employs a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any site hosted in a shared web hosting account with us as not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore any kind of content that you may have deleted by accident.