Data compression is the compacting of info by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will require less disk space than the initial one, so additional content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms that work in different ways and with many of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the information is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time must have adequate power to support this feature. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be made employs the advanced ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which similar file systems use, but it is also much quicker. The gains may be significant especially on compressible content which includes website files. While it may sound unreasonable, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard drive, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers will be upgraded. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to generate a number of daily backups of the entire content in every single hosting account, so in the event you delete something by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.