Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will need less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content could be stored on the same amount of space. There're different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the info is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform that employs compression in real time should have ample 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" the number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Web Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your web hosting account is created works by using the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is better in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it's also quicker. The benefits are significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk drive, so the performance of each and every site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the whole content in each and every web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup which we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.