Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. Thus, the compressed data takes substantially less disk space than the original one, so more content might be stored using identical amount of space. You can find different compression algorithms which function in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others remove excessive bits, but uncompressing the data later will lead to reduced quality compared to the original. Compressing and uncompressing content consumes a large amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so any hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have ample power to support this attribute. An example how data can be compressed is to replace 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 Cloud Web Hosting
The ZFS file system that is run on our cloud web hosting platform uses a compression algorithm named LZ4. The aforementioned is substantially faster and better than any other algorithm available on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backup copies of all the content kept in the cloud web hosting accounts on our servers daily. Both your content and its backups will take 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 stored.