Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field since info filed on hard disk drives is usually compressed in order to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing info and they offer different effectiveness depending on the content. Some of them remove just the redundant bits, so that no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which results in worse quality once the data is uncompressed. This process needs a lot of processing time, which means that a web hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data quickly. An instance how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, as an alternative to storing all five 1s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account is generated uses the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce numerous daily backups of the whole content in every single hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.