Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed data requires substantially less disk space than the initial one, so much more content could be stored using the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have ample power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems use because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard disk. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every Internet site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make a couple of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do our backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.