Data compression is the reduction of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and the process is really important in the web hosting field since information located on HDDs is generally compressed so as to take less space. You will find various algorithms for compressing info and they offer different efficiency depending on the content. A lot of them remove just the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others delete unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This method requires plenty of processing time, which means that an internet hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data in real time. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be created works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This is possible as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.