Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field because data filed on hard disks is generally compressed to take less space. You can find many different algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method employs a lot of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.