Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field as data kept on HDDs is usually compressed to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency based upon the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process consumes plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.