The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of data which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have plenty of resources to be able to process your data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud web hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it is applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than information can be read from a hard disk. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any site stored on a server which uses this algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.