The term data compression identifies decreasing the number of bits of data which should be saved or transmitted. You can do this with or without the loss of info, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression can be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the content and the quality will be identical, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more effective for different type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, which means that the server performing the action needs to have plenty of resources in order to be able to process the data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential 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 Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can improve the performance of any site hosted in a shared web hosting account with us since not only does it compress data more effectively than algorithms employed by other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds that are higher than the hard drive reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. A further advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to generate backup copies much quicker and on reduced disk space, so we shall have multiple daily backups of your databases and files and their generation won't influence the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all of the content that you could have removed by mistake.