Hostgator and Compression

[deking]

(06-10-2010 11:47 PM)pmeenan Wrote:  Wow, that's almost criminal at this point. (sorry, was swamped so I didn't get a chance to reply to your earlier post).

Assuming you aren't willing to switch hosting providers at this point there are a few things you can do:

- Use a CDN for your static assets. Most will auto gzip for you (MaxCDN does and is quite reasonably priced)
- If you main page is php you can use php's built-in support for gzipping but that will only work for things that are php

Images don't get gzipped so you don't have to worry about those (though they would also benefit from being served from a CDN).

Do you pay for bandwidth at hostgator? If so I could see why they might not have incentive to enable compression because it would reduce the used bandwidth significantly. I know both Dreamhost and Bluehost support gzip and have it enabled by default.

Well...apparently they do. I just talked with Hostgators tech support (via chat) and was assured that they did, in fact, support both mod_gzip and gzip on their shared hosting servers. The guy then went on to say that "Compression would not really help loading speed. It is very situational, actually." Right then I knew I was in trouble. I said, "There seems to be a whole host of "geeks" online who disagree with you and swear that text compression will speed up loading time." Then he gave me a link to this site http://www.samaxes.com/2008/04/htaccess-...th-saving/ which contains some code snippets. I added the code for gzip to my .htaccess (attached here) and loaded onto my server...ran the test again and saw no improvement in the "Compress Text" score. Would you take a look at my .htaccess file and see if I made any errors. Many thanks.
  htaccess code.txt (Size: 4.99 KB / Downloads: 5331)