Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits which should be stored or transmitted and the process is quite important in the internet hosting field since info stored on hard drives is generally compressed to take less space. You'll find various algorithms for compressing information and they provide different efficiency depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others erase unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method uses plenty of processing time, so a hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.