Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field as info stored on HDDs is typically compressed so as to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process employs plenty of processing time, which means that a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us produce a couple of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.