Data compression is the compacting of information by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored on the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have ample power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than info can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each site located on a server that uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a couple of daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.