Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info needs considerably less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every web hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have sufficient 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 consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your shared website hosting account will be created works by using the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter employs is superior in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which a variety of other file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. While it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to generate a large number of daily backups of the entire content in every single web hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, to not affect the performance of the servers.