Data compression is the compacting of info by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed information takes less disk space than the initial one, so much more content can be stored on the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data later on will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every Internet hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have enough power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the actual code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The cloud web hosting platform where your shared hosting account shall be made uses the revolutionary ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method which the aforementioned uses is better in numerous aspects, and not only does it compress info better than any compression method that other file systems use, but it is also considerably faster. The benefits will be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. Even though it could sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed info from a hard disk, so the performance of each and every website hosted on our servers will be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to make numerous daily backups of the entire content in every single web hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last backup that 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 the servers.