Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed info will need much less disk space than the original one, so much more content might be stored using the same amount of space. There are many different compression algorithms which work in different ways and with several of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to lower quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so every hosting platform that employs compression in real time must have ample power to support that feature. An example how information can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Website Hosting

The cloud internet hosting platform where your cloud website hosting account is created works by using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is better in many aspects, and not only does it compress data better than any compression method which other file systems use, but it's also much quicker. The gains may be significant especially on compressible content such as website files. While it may sound illogical, uncompressing data with LZ4 is quicker than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk, so the performance of any site hosted on our servers will be enhanced. The better and faster compression rates also make it possible for us to produce a number of daily backups of the entire content in each and every hosting account, so if you delete anything by mistake, the last back-up copy which we have will not be more than a few hours old. This can be done because the backups take much less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not influence the performance of our servers.