Data compression is the compacting of information by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information requires considerably less disk space than the initial one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There're various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have sufficient power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the actual code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account is created works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also a lot faster. The gains may be significant in particular on compressible content which includes website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of every website hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the entire content in each and every hosting account, so should you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have won't be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not affect the performance of the servers.