Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data will take less disk space than the initial one, so additional content could be stored using identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them just the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have enough power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud web hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform owing to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies more quickly and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always restore the content that you may have deleted by mistake.