The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be erased throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it's used by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems use since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than information can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every website hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate multiple daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backups take less space, but their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with other file systems.