The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of info that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, which means that what will be deleted during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality will be the same, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes plenty of processing time, so the server performing the action should have sufficient 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 sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can boost the performance of any Internet site hosted in a hosting account with us as not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This can be done 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. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies more rapidly and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any kind of content that you may have deleted by accident.