The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data that needs to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and the quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. There are various compression algorithms that are better for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action needs to have adequate resources to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account is made employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also much faster. The gains are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate numerous daily backups of the full content in each web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have won't be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.