The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of data which needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be erased during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have ample resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a cloud website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it 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 for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies faster and on less disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we can always recover the content that you may have deleted by accident.