HTTP Compression, also known as content encoding, takes text data and reduces it's file size. The browser then decompresses the content when it is loaded. What does all of this mean? Basically, it's a way to save bandwidth and decrease load times. This has many benefits in usability and cost.
Advantages in usability are seen for users with high speed as well as dial-up connections. With high speed connections, the load time difference may not be noticable for an average site. For example, compression is being used for thedweb.com, but our http, css, and javascript is already written in a relatively compressed fashion out of habit and our file sizes are smaller than the average website. However, use of http compression on our server still reduces our file sizes by an average of 67 percent. This translates to pages that load, on average, 0.3 seconds faster per page at 56K, but only 0.015 seconds faster on a cable modem. Seeing that the average website has pages that are 6 times larger than ours, this translates to load times in excess of 1.5 seconds faster per page at 56K.
What does this mean to you? Well, it means several things in terms of cost. In most cases, more time equal more money. In compression, less time equals less cost and more income. Compression reduces reduces bandwidth and transfer. Bandwidth can get pretty expensive, so if your site is saving 67 percent on html files and 33 percent overall, including images, you spend about 1/3 less on bandwidth. For a high traffic website, that can mean substantial savings. We operate another site which uses in excess of 1 Tb per month (which costs a pretty penny). With gzip compression, we are saving around 30 percent of our bandwidth and nearly $200/month on costs related to bandwidth and transfer rate.
Another way that compression can help you is because it loads pages faster. The last thing that you would want for your business is to lose a lead or a sale because your site took too long to load. We strive to make our pages as fast loading as possible with optimized images, CSS, caching, etc. and we use compression on our server to allow your visitors to see what you have to offer quickly. People want to read about your product, and compression can take your 90K of product data and reduce it to 30K so your page loads before your visitor or potential customer gets impatient and leaves, not buying your product, and adding insult to injury by buying from your competitor.
So if you don't host with us, try to host on a server that compresses your content. It means less cost, more sales, and a competative edge in your web-based business.