MediaTemple’s Lack of GZIP

Update As pointed out in the comments, the html for this site is being delivered as gzip. The css isn’t which is why YSlow is complaining. I need to remember to look to see what YSlow is complaining about before jumping to conclusions. I also have no explanation for why I read their FAQ multiple times and didn’t see the note that they support mod_deflate. So I take it all back. Disregard this entire post.

As those who attended my presentation on site speed know, I recently changed providers for my blog to MediaTemple because I was interested in their scalable grid structure.

Unfortunately, I forgot to check until after I had signed up and moved everything to MediaTemple before I found out that MediaTemple does not support mod_gzip for Apache.

I finally remembered to send them a support request asking if they had it in the plans or if it was just too difficult to implement on a grid server.

Absent good news from their support team, I’m afraid I’m going to have to move to another hosting solution. I love the service and system that MediaTemple has, but I feel like a hypocrite when I talk about site speed when I can’t optimize my own blog. It is frustrating.

At least my web site for our pet friendly vacation rental on the Oregon coast gets a “A” rating on the YSlow plugin. Thank god for small victories.

4 thoughts on “MediaTemple’s Lack of GZIP”

  1. Looks like this page was served from (mt) with gzip encoding:

    $ curl -s -H ‘Accept-Encoding: gzip’ http://www.userfirstweb.com/88/mediatemples-lack-of-gzip/ -I
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:14:16 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.0.54
    X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.7
    Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
    Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
    Pragma: no-cache
    X-Pingback: http://userfirstweb.com/xmlrpc.php
    Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=1252a29e45e61841ad58004b706bc26f; path=/
    Vary: Accept-Encoding
    Content-Encoding: gzip
    Content-Length: 20
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

    There might be some confusion as I think the module was renamed mod_deflate in Apache 2 (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html)

  2. Ok, this is the second time I’ve been burned looking at YSlow and not looking at what it is saying isn’t gzipped only looking at the high-level grade of an ‘F’.

    In my defense, Media Temple itself says that it doesn’t support gzip and my support ticket got rerouted as a feature request.

    It appears though that all I need to do is work on consolidating my css and turning on gzip for it. It is strange, however, that WordPress doesn’t show the gzip option in the admin area which is what I’m accustom to seeing.

  3. Dustin: I’m blind as a bat apparently. I just reread the FAQ again and it says clearly:

    As a side note, mod_deflate is installed on the (gs) Grid-Service platform.

    The real lesson here appears to be that I need to read more carefully. :-)

  4. I read your blog entry, and didn’t notice the edit about mod_deflate. I found that out by checking their docs.

    Friendly suggestion, perhaps you could highlight the update about mod_deflate and “taking it all back”, because its not clear.

    Cheers!

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