The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are better for various sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have adequate resources to be able to process the data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is known as LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a shared website hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies much more rapidly and on less disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. That way, we can always recover the content that you may have removed by mistake.