The term data compression means lowering the number of bits of information that should be saved or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be removed in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed afterwards, in the first case the data and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality shall be worse. You'll find different compression algorithms which are more efficient for different type of info. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action should have sufficient resources to be able to process the data fast enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Website Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform is named LZ4. It can enhance the performance of any site hosted in a website hosting account on our end because not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by other file systems, but it uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This can be done 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 allows us to create backups at a higher speed and on reduced disk space, so we shall have several daily backups of your files and databases and their generation will not affect the performance of the servers. This way, we could always recover all content that you may have deleted by accident.