Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. As a result, the compressed info will take substantially less disk space than the initial one, so additional content can be stored using the same amount of space. You will find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with many of them just the redundant bits are deleted, therefore once the information is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others remove unneeded bits, but uncompressing the data at a later time will lead to lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a large amount of system resources, in particular CPU processing time, therefore each and every Internet hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have enough power to support this attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" how many consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of saving the actual code.