The term data compression identifies lowering the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. There are different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, which means that the server carrying out the action needs to have enough resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared web hosting account shall be made employs the outstanding ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it's also a lot quicker. The gains will be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. Although it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content in each and every web hosting account, so should you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, to not change the performance of the servers.