Amit wrote about how to enable gzip compression on sites using PHP, and since almost all of my sites use PHP it was a perfect match. A few months ago I turned on mod_gzip in Apache but I ran into some snags and eventually turned it off.

All I had to do for this solution was add the following line to .htaccess.

php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler

The handy gzip compression test says I got the following bandwidth savings:

The sites feel zippier too.