Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data 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 will find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have enough power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the leading-edge ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do the backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.