The term data compression describes reducing the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing information, so what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and the quality shall be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are better for different kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes plenty of processing time, so the server executing the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your info quick enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and just how many should have 0 inside the binary code instead of storing the particular 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account will be created employs the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method that some other file systems use, but it's also faster. The gains may be significant particularly on compressible content such as website files. Despite the fact that it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of any Internet site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to generate a large number of daily backups of the full content in every single hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last back-up copy which we have won't be more than several hours old. This is possible as the backups take significantly less space and their generation is quick enough, so as to not change the performance of our servers.