...and do I need that? Webmaster tools wants me to use mod_deflate to compress bunches of stuff so I figured out how to do it - but then my host doesn't offer it. Is it something that hosts should offer? Do most offer it at a reasonable price these days? My current host wants me to pay over $100 dollars a month to have mod_deflate activated on my site. I currently pay less than 10 dollars per month, is that right? Thanks!
Hello there, Your host (I would hope) is telling you to move to a VPS or similar plan to have this enabled, thus the cost increase. I am not sure why they would not have it enabled for shared hosting, perhaps they are worried about server loads...? Mod_deflate is pretty common, and most hosts to have it enabled. Regards, Chris
Being a standard nowadays, mod_deflate is offered by majority of hosting companies, as far as I know. However, may hosters still offer it as optional, while you obviously will have to enable gzip compression to improve load times of website page. For that mod_deflate installation highly required.
Almost all hosting providers offer mod-deflate module even with shared hosting as it comes by default with apache 2.4. You can just enable it from your cpanel and the code is auto written in .htaccess file just as shown above. It helps to improve your site load time by compression so you get faster response time.