The term data compression means reducing the number of bits of info that has to be stored or transmitted. You can do this with or without losing information, which means that what will be deleted at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the information and its quality will be the same, while in the second case the quality will be worse. You can find various compression algorithms that are more efficient for various type of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes lots of processing time, so the server carrying out the action should have plenty of resources in order to be able to process your info fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 inside the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Website Hosting
The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm called LZ4. The latter is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk, which improves the performance of Internet sites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data really well and it does that very quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content stored in the shared website hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will need less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be kept.