The term data compression means decreasing the number of bits of data which should be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of information, so what will be deleted throughout the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the content and its quality shall be the same, whereas in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms which are better for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action needs to have enough resources to be able to process your info fast enough. An 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 instead of storing the actual 1s and 0s.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is called LZ4. It can boost the performance of any website hosted in a shared hosting account on our end because not only does it compress data much better than algorithms used by alternative file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the HDD reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform due to the fact that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it allows us to make backup copies quicker and on lower disk space, so we will have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. This way, we can always restore the content that you may have erased by mistake.