The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, so what will be removed 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 the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data frequently takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have sufficient resources to be able to process your data fast enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account shall be made employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The gains will be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in each and every hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.