The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data that has to be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased during the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. A 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 Web Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your web hosting account will be made works by using the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also a lot quicker. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Although it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the whole content in every single web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.