Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the internet hosting field because info kept on hard disk drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method needs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance 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 Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be stored.