Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that have to be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the internet hosting field because information recorded on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. The process needs plenty of processing time, therefore a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.