The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of information which has to be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of data, so what will be deleted at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. There're various compression algorithms which are better for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes plenty of processing time, so the server performing the action must have sufficient resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your website hosting account will be generated uses the impressive ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the latter uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that a variety of other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The gains are significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. While it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each Internet site hosted on our servers shall be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to produce multiple daily backups of the full content in every single web hosting account, so in the event you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This is possible as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not affect the performance of our servers.