Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is very important in the internet hosting field as info stored on HDDs is usually compressed so as to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing info and they provide different effectiveness based upon the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. This process uses a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as 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 consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm you will find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we can generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be kept.