James Robertson remarks on the paucity of sites supporting conditional get and gzip compression – I’m guilty as charged.

I have a fairly typical hosting plan: charged for disk space and bandwidth above my base allocation with all CPU cycles included. Since my bandwidth usage is comfortably below my base allocation, there is no motivation for me to conserve. And since it would shift usage from a metered resource (bandwidth) to an unmetered resource (CPU cycles), there is no motivation for my host to provide mod_gzip.

Weblog software should have the option to generate both a normal and a gzipped RSS feed. Then we could turn on gzip content encoding and apache would serve the gzipped version when appropriate. This swaps between two metered services and doesn’t require a change to the billing model. I think that hosting providers could buy into that.

PS: That’s a pretty old link. I have no idea whether gzip content encoding is still supported.