The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are better for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have plenty of resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site located on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.