Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them only the redundant bits are erased, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have ample power to support that feature. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared web hosting account is created uses the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it is also quicker. The benefits may be significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Even though it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every Internet site hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible because the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.