Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data requires considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content might be stored on the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with some of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a cloud website hosting account with us because not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This can be done by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform considering the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to generate backups much quicker and on lower disk space, so we will have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not influence the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you could have erased by accident.