Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires considerably less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored using the same amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this feature. An example how info 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 storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud hosting platform where your new shared web hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system that powers the platform. The algorithm is superior to the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens faster than data can be read from a hdd. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio make it possible for us to make a number of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for one month. Not only do our backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with some other file systems.