Gzip Compression can reduce the size of a website by more than 50%, thus making it much faster to download over the internet.
Compression is automatically enabled, and handled correctly by the Servebolt hosting stack. That means, that the internet-facing webserver is compressing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, etc on-the-fly.
It is important to note, that the back-end webserver Apache should never do compression. That means that you should also not enable gzip compression in .htaccess. If you do enable gzip in .htaccess and Apache, it will force the internet-facing webserver nginx to decompress the contents before caching it. That means unnecessary extra CPU time and power used for compression and decompression.
Co-founder of Servebolt, and Head of R&D, Hans Kristian Rosbach develops and maintains a modern version of zlib, the compression library that is used for gzip compression. Zlib-ng (zlib “Next Generation”) compresses both faster, and better than stock versions of zlib.
Zlib-ng is in use for all websites hosted on Servebolt.