Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be saved or transmitted and the process is very important in the web hosting field as data filed on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. The method employs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm out there, especially 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 overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.