HostRocket has just removed mod_gzip from all their servers because they said it is very unstable and causing too many problems. Has anyone else had any problems with it? I only ask because we used this throughout our site and it helped save us a lot of money in bandwidth charges. I may even have to move for this reason.

hmm, it wouldnt be because it saves people bandwidth and its removal will mean all their users use more bandwidth, thus having to pay them more money.

just a thought, ill kick myself repeatedly if im wrong :D

mod_gzip runs fine for me reduced my bandwidth from 120 - 150GB/month to under 100GB/month been using it for a few months now no problems

As far as I know Ventures Online uses mod_gzip on all servers, even on the big shared one without problems (I have ded. with them).
Did you ask them what exactly the problem was?

We run mod_gzip with no apparent problems either. Saves customers 60-88% of their bandwidth (most of them anyway).

We have a problem with mod_gzip
It fill the tmp dir 2 times, and that cause apache goes down.
You can prevent that changing the temp dir in the httpd.conf to a biggest partition.

Wait a couple of days so this thread gets ripe with fixes, and then send them an email with a link here :)

I've been using it for a while one and it's amazing! Saving on average about 70-90% on most files (not images since they're already compressed). It runs smooth and never had any problems with it.

Randy,

We said before that we will be putting it back up as soon as we get it working stable. Trust me we want it up just as much as you do, take how much $$ it saves you and then multiply that by the number of accounts we have... remember we pay for the bw under 12gb :)

-Brendan

Originally posted by bbrader
Randy,

We said before that we will be putting it back up as soon as we get it working stable. Trust me we want it up just as much as you do, take how much $$ it saves you and then multiply that by the number of accounts we have... remember we pay for the bw under 12gb :)

-Brendan

I didn't mean for it to sound like I was running here to complain about it. I was just asking if any hosts have had any problems with it...

As far as me thinking you wouldn't put it back up, I was just going by what John wrote in a support ticket..

On 2001-07-24 EST at 16:38:30, he/she wrote:
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Disabled? When will it be enabled again? We use that throughout our site.

Thanks


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On 2001-07-25 EST at 01:12:05, john wrote:
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It will not be re-enabled. It is not a very stable module which is why we were reluctant to use it in the first place. It been causing problems on all of our servers and is being removed.

John Reyes
HostRocket.com Support



That's when I came here and posted my question.

We were running it for a while but also ended up removing it. It just began causing problems with apache. Suexec running with the cpanel has been more stable so far ;)

Im not sure why he told you that, he didnt ask me about it at all.

-Brendan

Using this mod is to the hosts advantage. They are giving such low prices because they are hoping the users won't use all their bandwidth. So the less they use, the less it costs them. I wouldn't suspect them to do this to make you pay overages on bandwidth. Because for Most of people they will just come closer to their limit without going over, and only the host will have to pay more.

This works GREAT on our servers!

mod_gzip is not (in general) account specific. If a visit to a virtual account uses 100k, then (if text such as html) that drops to about 20k with mod_gzip installed. So this is just as much, if not more, beneficial to the virtual accounts as it is the host. In other words, now a virtual account can send out more data without going over their limit since the data is now compressed.

In other words, let's say you are a virtual account with a 5 gig monthly limit. Let's say you are doing about 4.9 gigs per month now. If the host installs mod_gzip and your data transfer remains about the same, you would see your bandwidth usage drop by 50% to 2.5 gigs or more. Now you dont have to worry so much about hitting your bandwidth limit.

For hosts that run such things as CPanel where client's bandwidth reports are inaccurate, this can help make up for that. The host cannot fix the CPanel problems, but it can install mod_gzip to help level the field a bit. The good side to this is it can save the host a bundle in bandwidth charges. On the negative side, it means that the host can also lose money since not so many clients will be much interested in upgrading to higher accounts. It would depend on the host as to how they see it. Personally, I prefer to save in bandwidth charges versus clients having to upgrade their accounts.

I think our limit on bandwidth is 17gb. The last 3 months, since using mod_gzip, we've used between 14-17. Before that we used 22gb and had to pay a good amount extra in the overage costs (our limit was also lower then). So you can see how HostRocket is actually losing money on us because of mod_gzip (by the way, I am not suggesting they disabled it for that reason).

Just another way to look at it... then again if all customers use it they would save money elsewhere.

Randy,

mod_gzip will hopefully cut our bandwidth bills by several thousand dollars a month once we get it up and running on all the servers... its actually running on the one youre on now anyways, it has been for 2 days now as a test.

-Brendan

Originally posted by Tcoy
We were running it for a while but also ended up removing it. Suexec running with the cpanel has been more stable so far ;)

Uhm ... we run suEXEC and mod_gzip together - they do completely different things ;)

I think he was comparing the stability (or instability) of the two.

Ok ok, bad comparison I guess.