samaxes

“.htaccess - gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving” is one of the most popular posts on samaxes.
It’s basically on how to compress and cache your site content with Apache and .htaccess file.

It works like a charm, but it’s not yet the perfect configuration for me.
I wanted something that I can use out-of-the-box without having to rely on external extension modules or tools.

If you are lucky enough to have Apache 2 with your hosting provider you can use the mod_deflate module that comes bundled with it.

In order to compress your text files with this Apache’s module you just have to add the following lines to your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
  <FilesMatch "\.(css|js|x?html?|php)$">
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  </FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

This will gzip all your *.css, *.js, *.html, *.html, *.xhtml, and *.php files.
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Last week I changed my hosting provider from Site5 to NearlyFreeSpeech.NET.
Despite the fact that the first one is faster than the second, NFSN is a lot more cheaper (I only pay what I really use).

So in order to speed up my site and save bandwidth (the more I use the more I pay) I use .htaccess file to gzip my text based files and optimize cache HTTP headers.
Although this site is powered by Wordpress which has some really great plugins to optimize PHP output I wanted a more generic solution which can be applied to all PHP web applications.

I also try to follow as much as I can the rules for high performance web sites so don’t be surprised if some Expires header seems too long (far future Expires header rule requires at least 172801 seconds).
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