The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of information which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing info, so what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are better for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action must have enough resources in order to be able to process the info fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm which we work with on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's applied by the leading-edge ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is better than the ones other file systems work with because its compression ratio is a lot higher and it processes data significantly faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than data can be read from a hdd. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of each website located on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate several daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do the backup copies take less space, but their generation won't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.