Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any Internet site hosted in a website hosting account with us as not only does it compress info much better than algorithms employed by alternative file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups more quickly and on lower 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. This way, we could always recover all of the content that you could have erased by accident.