Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info will require less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content might be stored on the same amount of space. You will find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.