Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info located on HDDs is typically compressed to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness based on the content. A lot of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server should be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies much more quickly and on lower disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore all the content that you could have removed by accident.