Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and the process is rather important in the web hosting field because information stored on hard disk drives is usually compressed so as to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.