The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of information that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing info, so what will be removed throughout the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The compression algorithm which we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud website hosting account will be created is called LZ4 and it is applied by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than information can be read from a hdd. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of every Internet site stored on a server that uses this particular algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to generate several daily backup copies of the full content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation does not slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.