Data compression is the decrease of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is rather important in the web hosting field because information stored on hard disks is often compressed in order to take less space. There're different algorithms for compressing data and they offer different efficiency based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others delete unneeded bits, which results in worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The process employs a lot of processing time, which means that a hosting server needs to be powerful enough to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An example how binary code could be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five sequential 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.