Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed info needs much less disk space than the initial one, so much more content might be stored on identical amount of space. There're different compression algorithms that function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have sufficient 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Web 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 shared web hosting account with us as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it 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 considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies more speedily and on lower disk space, so we shall have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore any content that you may have removed by mistake.