Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the initial one, so extra content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every web hosting platform which employs compression in real time must have adequate power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info significantly better than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. An additional advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to create backup copies more quickly and on reduced disk space, so we can have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore all content that you may have deleted by mistake.