Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is rather important in the internet hosting field since information recorded on hard disk drives is often compressed to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. Some 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. This method uses plenty of processing time, so a hosting server needs to be powerful enough so as to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. An example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end since not only does it compress info more effectively than algorithms used by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backup copies more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover all content that you could have removed by mistake.