The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of data that should be stored or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be removed throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There're different compression algorithms that are more efficient for different kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have adequate resources to be able to process your data quick enough. An 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 as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account will be created uses the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains are significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.