The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of data which should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more effective for various kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.