Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that data filed on hard drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness based upon the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method employs plenty of processing time, so a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm out there, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.