BTW, I will be posting an update to this article some time soon. I have made a few changes and found some very useful tools for implementing quite a few other optimizations. Stay tuned!

Dude.

Dude!

You so ****ING rock. My site is SO much faster now, it’s insane. And being that I am using Hostmonster, I rather expected this not to work, but it does! w00t.

You are teh awesome. I am SO giving you some love on my blog (http://geeksneversleep.com, if you want to see what your awesomeness helped…)

:]

I just received this response:
We do not have mod_deflate and it doesn’t look like mod_gzip is working any more either. My site used to show it was gziped but now it doesn’t I guess the admins decided to remove it from the servers.

Thanks for getting back to me. I did check everything and I have everything setup as you have suggested Single php.ini, I even did a fresh install and modified the lines to set ob_gzhandler and commented out the zlib stuff.

After some more testing this is what I have observed.

a) Just changing the output handler to ob_gzhandler automatically makes my website serve zipped text/html files. It does this even when I have not inserted any of the .htaccess code.

b) The additional code in .htaccess doesn’t seem to have much effect. It is as if it is not finding mod_gzip.c and so it doesn’t use any of the code in the If block. I tried removing the If statement and put the contents of the code directly in the .htaccess file but then I started getting 500 errors.

Do you have any thoughts? As for my site, it is running WP 2.7.1 and I am using the Hyper Cache plugin to serve cached pages along with DB-Cache to cache some PHP queries.

So far I have had no luck trying to serve zipped js and css files.

While you do not have access to the http.conf file in the shared server environment, you can still utilize .htaccess files instead, which will override some settings within http.conf.

Also, note the following:

1. An .htaccess file will only affect the directory in which it is currently located and any subdirectories just below it. It will not affect anything higher in the directory tree structure.

2. Are you utilizing a global php.ini file? This can be configured using PHP Config from cPanel. Choose ‘PHP5 (single php.ini)’ > ‘Save Changes’ > ‘Install php.ini master file’. Rename the file to php.ini in your /public_html directory, then edit it so that only ‘output_handler’ is set to use ‘ob_gzhandler’. ‘zlib.output_compression’ and ‘zlib.output_handler’ can be commented out using a preceding semicolon (;).

I tried following this post, but I am unable to gzip any other file but the main HTML file. The js/css files are still uncompressed (they are on my server). Is this a limitation because HostMonster does not allow access to httpd.conf or is there something I am missing to enable the zipping of js/css files in addition to basic html files?