The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info which should be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be erased throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and the quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are better for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have ample resources to be able to process the info quick enough. A simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is created employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content in every single Internet hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.