Data Compression
Learn precisely what Data Compression is and discover how it could affect your websites as well as the experience of your website visitors.
The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of data that should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be deleted during the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is called LZ4. It can improve the performance of any website hosted in a website hosting account on our end as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by various file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies at a higher speed and on lower disk space, so we will have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we can always recover any content that you may have deleted by accident.