Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Because of this, the compressed info will need substantially less disk space than the initial one, so more content could be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later will result in reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, so every hosting platform which employs compression in real time needs to have enough power to support that attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm that we use on the cloud hosting platform where your new website hosting account will be created is known as LZ4 and it's used by the advanced ZFS file system which powers the platform. The algorithm is far better than the ones other file systems employ because its compression ratio is higher and it processes data considerably quicker. The speed is most noticeable when content is being uncompressed as this happens even faster than data can be read from a hard drive. Consequently, LZ4 improves the performance of any site hosted on a server which uses the algorithm. We use LZ4 in one more way - its speed and compression ratio let us make several daily backups of the entire content of all accounts and store them for 30 days. Not only do our backups take less space, but their generation doesn't slow the servers down like it can often happen with various other file systems.