Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be stored or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that information stored on HDDs is often compressed so as to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they provide different efficiency based on the content. Some of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process consumes a lot of processing time, so a web hosting server should be powerful enough 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 Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your hosting account shall be created uses the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also much faster. The benefits can be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Despite the fact that it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the entire content in every single Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.