The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the data and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms which are more efficient for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have sufficient 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 consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm that we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is greater than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard disk drive. Because of this, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every website hosted on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We take advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for a month. Not only do our backups take less space, but also their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it often happens with various other file systems.