The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information which should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, so what will be erased at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more effective for various sort of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have enough resources to be able to process the info fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The ZFS file system that operates on our cloud Internet hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web 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 quickly, we are able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the web hosting accounts on our servers on a daily basis. 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.