The term data compression refers to reducing the number of bits of information that has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms that are better for different sort of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process the data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud internet hosting platform where your new cloud hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which powers the system. The algorithm is much better than the ones other file systems work with as its compression ratio is much higher and it processes data a lot quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens at a faster rate than information can be read from a hard drive. Therefore, LZ4 improves the performance of each Internet site located on a server which uses the algorithm. We take full advantage of LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us generate a number of daily backup copies of the entire content of all accounts and keep them for thirty days. Not only do these backup copies take less space, but also their generation will not slow the servers down like it often happens with some other file systems.