Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed data will need substantially less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have ample power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account shall be created employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is better in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The benefits will be significant especially on compressible content like website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the entire 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 is possible as the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.