Real Matters

I stumbled upon Matt Heaton's blog since my last post, and learnt that Bluehost offers mod_deflate.

According to Matt, "Mod_deflate basically takes certain types of files and compresses them at the server level and then sends those smaller files to you. Images, zip files, etc don’t compress well (And so we don’t compress these, but HTML files, javascript files, css files, etc compress very well".

Mr. Heaton believes that the problem with mod_deflate is its requirement of significant CPU usage on the server to use, and can cause servers to be slow, and the website(s) on that server in turn.

Matt announced that Bluehost/Hostmonster has a solution for this mod_deflate issue.

CPU usage is track in realtime every two seconds via a patch on the Apache server. If CPU usage exceeds a certain threshold then mod_deflate is temporarily suspended.

As to his preference to mod_deflate instead of mod_zip, I left a comment on his blog hoping he would reply since it was posted back in February.

I have a website hosted at Bluehost.com, which i have been monitoring with Google's Webmaster's Tools.

A couple of months ago the Webmaster Tools dedicated an area within its Labs sections called site performance, which shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for visitors.

For some time now the tool has been alerting me that my site is slower than more than 60% of websites on the internet. It has suggested that I compress my website using GZIP which can be used to compress the WebPages on the site, and most of its content and supporting files such as .css files.

I have therefore make an effort at contacting Bluehost.com about the fact that I have found it difficult in compression the website using the .htacccess file, but Bluehost has admitted that the hosting company doesn't support the GZIP functionality.

I then threatened the support person that if I am unable to compress the website I will be moving to a host which does, but he reiterated there is nothing that can be done.

I will therefore have to move the website as Google and probably other search engines will determine the ranking of websites based on the speed and compression of the website.

I have decided to post this article as it has been unclear if Bluehost allows the GZIP compression functionality.