Frequently Asked Questions

Enabling mod_Deflate with Your Hosting Account

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Last Updated: February 26, 2014 10:32 AM

Mod_deflate is an Apache Web server module installed on all of our Linux hosting accounts by default. For more information, see What is mod_deflate?

Mod_deflate compresses content returned from your hosting account using the gzip compression algorithm. You should only use mod_deflate on text, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and XML. Multimedia files are often already compressed; using mod_deflate on these types of files does nothing and can result in slower page-load times.

If you want to use mod_deflate, you need to know what kind of hosting account you have. For more information, see What type of hosting account do I have?

Web Hosting

Our Linux Web Hosting hosting accounts have mod_deflate enabled by default. This compresses all text type files requested from it. You can disable mod_deflate on a per-directory basis and it applies recursively. You can place the following in a .htaccess file to disable mod_deflate:

SetEnvIf Request_URI .* no-gzip=1

Classic

Our Classic Hosting accounts do not enable mod_deflate at the global level, but you can enable it in your .htaccess file. You can enable it on a per-directory basis and it applies recursively. You can place the following in a .htaccess file to enable mod_deflate for text and javascript MIME types:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript

For more information, see: