Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that data recorded on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. A number of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, therefore a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.