The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be removed throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process the data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of any website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do these backups take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it often happens with alternative file systems.