The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information that needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, so what will be erased during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are better for different type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server performing the action needs to have adequate resources in order to be able to process the data 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 instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform is called LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a cloud website hosting account with us as not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms used by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This can be done by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies quicker and on lower disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover any content that you could have erased by accident.