Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field since info kept on HDDs is usually compressed so as to take less space. There're many different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The method needs plenty of processing time, therefore a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's applied by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than data can be read from a hdd. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site hosted on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.