Data compression is the compacting of data by reducing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed info will require much less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored on the same amount of space. There are different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are removed, therefore once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so any hosting platform which uses compression in real time should have adequate power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.
Data Compression in Shared Hosting
The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform employs a compression algorithm named LZ4. The latter is a lot faster and better than every other algorithm you'll find, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Because the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very fast, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not affect the performance of the hosting servers where your content will be stored.