Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this particular process is really important in the internet hosting field because information filed on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing info and they have different efficiency depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others remove unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This process employs a lot of processing time, therefore an internet hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An illustration how binary code may be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than every other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the servers where your content will be kept.