Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field due to the fact that information filed on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing data and they offer different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server has to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An illustration how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the exceptional ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens at a faster rate than info can be read from a hdd. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of any site hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for 30 days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation does not slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.