The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of information, which means that what will be deleted during the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the info and its quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are better for various type of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server executing the action should have enough resources to be able to process the data fast enough. One 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 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account is made employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is greater in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it's also quicker. The gains may be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a number of daily backups of the full content in each and every Internet hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.