Data Compression
What type of information could you compress? How exactly does data compression function? Discover more about its space-saving advantages.
Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will need much less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content might be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are removed, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have sufficient power to support that attribute. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is considerably faster and better than every other algorithm you will 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 disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web servers where your content will be stored.