Since we posted the FIFA World Cup Calendar 2010 on our company’s web site, traffic has increased dramatically.
We have had over 3.5 million hits in 10 days.
The problem was that the site was using more than 2 Gigs a day. In South Africa bandwidth is not cheap. Our site uses Joomla and even after enabling Gzip compression it did not help as only html/php content was being compressed.
Most of the traffic generated was because of the CSS & Javascript files
The fix!
I decided to modify the .htaccess file to compress all content outgoing on the webserver, our server uses mimimal load.
These are the lines I added to my .htaccess
<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
</ifmodule>
Also this handy site allowed me to test various pages & files if the server was serving them compressed.