Data compression is the compacting of data by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information requires considerably less disk space than the original one, so extra content can be stored using the same amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms that function in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are removed, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data following that will result in reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, therefore any web hosting platform that uses compression in real time must have adequate 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.

Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your shared website hosting account is created employs the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is superior in a number of aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method which a number of other file systems use, but it is also considerably quicker. The benefits are significant especially on compressible content like website files. Even though it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of any website hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and faster compression rates also allow us to make multiple daily backups of the whole content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete something by accident, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done because the backups take considerably less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.