Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed information will need less disk space than the original one, so additional content could be stored on identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have enough power to support this feature. An example how information can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account will be made employs the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter employs is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that similar file systems use, but it is also a lot faster. The gains are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it may sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every Internet site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to make a number of daily backups of the full content in each hosting account, so should you delete something 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 considerably less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of the servers.