Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information 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 takes a huge amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud web hosting platform where your new shared website hosting account shall be created is named LZ4 and it's applied by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that powers the system. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens faster than info can be read from a hard disk drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each site hosted on a server which uses this algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in an additional way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to generate multiple daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and keep them for a month. Not only do these backups take less space, but in addition their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.