The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be erased at the time 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 will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server executing the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared website hosting account is made works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is greater in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the full content in each and every Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.