Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits which have to be saved or transmitted and this particular process is quite important in the web hosting field as info stored on hard drives is typically compressed so as to take less space. You can find different algorithms for compressing information and they provide different effectiveness based on the content. A number of them remove only the redundant bits, so that no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which results in worse quality when your data is uncompressed. This method uses a lot of processing time, so an internet hosting server has to be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data right away. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there are five consecutive 1s, for example, rather than storing all five 1s.