Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information needs much less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored using the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have enough power to support that attribute. An example how data 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 keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Since the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we can generate several backups of all the content kept in the cloud hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very quickly, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.