Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed data will require much less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, which means that once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which employs compression in real time should have enough power to support this feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your website hosting account is made works by using the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers shall be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make a large number of daily backups of the whole content in each hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, to not influence the performance of our servers.