Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed data will require less disk space than the original one, so much more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a cloud hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data more efficiently than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backups at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your databases and files and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. In this way, we could always recover any content that you may have removed by accident.