The term data compression refers to lowering the number of bits of information which has to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be erased at the time of the compression will be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the information and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms that are better for various sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data generally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action should have ample resources to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 within the binary code as an alternative to storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Hosting
The cloud hosting platform where your hosting account is generated uses the reliable ZFS file system. The LZ4 compression method that the latter uses is superior in various aspects, and not only does it compress information better than any compression method that many other file systems use, but it's also faster. The benefits can be significant especially on compressible content like website files. Although it could sound irrational, uncompressing data with LZ4 is faster than reading uncompressed data from a hard disk drive, so the performance of every site hosted on our servers shall be improved. The better and quicker compression rates also make it possible for us to produce numerous daily backups of the full content in each and every web hosting account, so if you delete anything by accident, the last backup which we have will not be more than several hours old. This can be done as the backups take a lot less space and their generation is fast enough, so as to not change the performance of the servers.