The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and the quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action needs to have ample resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code instead of storing the actual 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 will be created is named LZ4 and it's used by the cutting-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with since its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens more quickly than data can be read from a hdd. Because of this, 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 several daily backup copies of the whole content of all accounts and store them for thirty days. 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.