The term data compression describes lowering the number of bits of information which needs to be saved or transmitted. This can be done with or without the loss of data, so what will be erased in the course of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and the quality shall be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You'll find various compression algorithms which are better for various kind of data. Compressing and uncompressing data often takes lots of processing time, which means that the server performing the action should have plenty of 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 sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your hosting account is created uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the aforementioned employs is greater in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also faster. The benefits are significant in particular on compressible content like website files. Despite the fact that it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of each site hosted on our servers shall be upgraded. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the entire content in each hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy that we have will not be more than a couple of hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is quick enough, to not affect the performance of our servers.