Data Compression

Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be stored or transmitted and this process is really important in the web hosting field as information stored on HDDs or SSDs is typically compressed to take less space. There are various algorithms for compressing information and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data will be lost, while others remove unnecessary bits, which leads to worse quality when the particular data is uncompressed. The process uses plenty of processing time, so a hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data immediately. One example how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five sequential 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.