The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without losing data, so what will be deleted during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are more efficient for different kind of info. Compressing and uncompressing data in most cases takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm which we employ on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account shall be created is known as LZ4 and it is used by the revolutionary ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is more advanced than the ones other file systems use as its compression ratio is higher and it processes data a lot faster. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed since this happens even faster than information can be read from a hard disk. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each and every site stored on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio allow us to make multiple daily backups of the whole content of all accounts and store them for 30 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 alternative file systems.