Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will need less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored using identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.