Data compression is the compacting of data by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. Consequently, the compressed data will take considerably less disk space than the initial one, so more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You'll find various compression algorithms which function in different ways and with several of them only the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there's no loss of quality. Others erase unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data following that will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content needs a significant amount of system resources, and in particular CPU processing time, so each and every web hosting platform which employs 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" the number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the whole code.