Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data takes much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have ample power to support that attribute. An example how data 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 entire code.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a hosting account with us as not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always recover all of the content that you may have removed by mistake.