Hostgator and Compression

[pmeenan]

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.