How to check if my shared hosting provider has mod_gzip installed?

Question

Is there a way to check if my hosting provider has mod_gzip enabled? It's not mentioned in any info on the web site, nor there is a forum to contact other people about this problem. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can check that with either PHP’s apache_get_modules or phpinfo.

If you want to compress your output, you might want to try the output buffer handler ob_gzhandler. It automatically determines what type of content encoding the browser will accept ("gzip", "deflate" or none at all) and will return its output accordingly. Just put ob_start('ob_gzhandler') at the start of your script file (before anything is put out) and it does the rest.

Or you simply use Apache’s mod_deflate that even can compress static files that are directly passed through to the client.

Answer 2

If you upload a tiny little PHP file to your server containing the following you can see all the output from phpinfo. Lots of interesting details.

<?php
   phpinfo();
?>

Searching the page for "Loaded Modules" should show all the modules that are loaded. Look for mod_deflate also as that seems to be more common (comes with Apache 2.0 installs anyway). Performance? gzip might be more compress, deflate might be faster.