Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field because data located on hard disk drives is usually compressed to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server should be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, 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 sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the website 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 very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.