Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info will require considerably less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored on the same amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than info can be read from a hdd. For that reason, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site hosted on a server that uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with alternative file systems.