The term data compression describes decreasing the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, so what will be removed during the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more effective for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, therefore the server carrying out the action should have adequate resources in order to be able to process the info quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be generated employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is greater in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The gains will be significant particularly on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers shall be better. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the whole content in each and every Internet hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by accident, the last backup that we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, to not influence the performance of the servers.