The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing information, which means that what will be removed at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes plenty of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process your info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backups more speedily and on reduced disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover all the content that you may have erased by mistake.