Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info needs considerably less disk space than the initial one, so much more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with some of them just the redundant bits are erased, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase excessive bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will result in lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any web hosting platform that employs compression in real time needs to have adequate power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the entire code.

Data Compression in Shared Hosting

The cloud hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be generated employs the innovative ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned employs is superior in lots of aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that a number of other file systems use, but it's also faster. The benefits may be significant particularly on compressible content which includes website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers will be boosted. The better and quicker compression rates also allow us to produce a large number of daily backups of the full content in each Internet hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, 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 fast enough, to not change the performance of the servers.