The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be removed during the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm available 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, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.