The term data compression identifies reducing the number of bits of data that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are better for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process the data quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Cloud Web Hosting

The ZFS file system which is run on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than any other algorithm you can find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. internet content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data quite well and it does that very fast, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content stored in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not change the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.