Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field because info located on HDDs is generally compressed in order to take less space. There are different algorithms for compressing information and they offer different effectiveness based on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality once the particular data is uncompressed. This method needs plenty of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm that we work with on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared hosting account will be created is named LZ4 and it is used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems employ as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens quicker than data can be read from a hard disk. As a result, LZ4 improves the performance of every website stored on a server which uses this particular algorithm. We use LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation will not slow the servers down like it can often happen with other file systems.