Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that should be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the web hosting field because data recorded on hard disk drives is generally compressed so as to take less space. You will find different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different effectiveness depending on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality when the data is uncompressed. The process requires a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. One example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is a lot better than the ones other file systems employ since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each website stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.