Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the web hosting field as info recorded on hard disk drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account with us as not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backups more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not change the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore any kind of content that you could have removed by accident.