Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information will take much less disk space than the original one, so more content could be stored using identical amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.