Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information will need much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content can be stored using identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than info can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each site stored on a server that uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for one month. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with many other file systems.