Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Web Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a web hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups much more rapidly and on less disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always restore the content that you may have deleted by mistake.