Enabling GZIP Compression on Mediatemple DV or Grid Service

Update: I no longer recommend MediaTemple as their service has simply gone downhill to the point that I don’t believe they are worth the amount of money they charge. If you’re looking for top notch WordPress hosting, check out WPEngine. For a level of service equal to MediaTemple, but at a much lower price, I’d just go with GoDaddy.

I’ve recently stumbled across FeedtheBot, a site that helps take information from Google’s Pagespeed service and make it a little easier to digest for those of us who don’t eat Python for breakfast or take baths in Apache configurations.

The link above points to a page where they provide some information on how you can enable GZIP compression on your server, however I found that it doesn’t work with Mediatemple Grid Service, or even with their DV servers right out of the box. Apparently mod_gzip is not setup by default.

You could figure out how to turn that on for DV, or you can use the following which works for me on both a DV and two different Grid Service setups.

Just paste this into your .htaccess file.

# BEGIN GZIP
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript image/svg+xml
</ifmodule>
# END GZIP

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