Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field due to the fact that info filed on hard disk drives is often compressed so as to take less space. You can find various algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process requires a lot of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.