Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info will take much less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support this attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than data can be read from a hard disk drive. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of any Internet site hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.