Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info needs considerably less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website located on a server that uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a number of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.