Apache: Why we don’t Support mod_pagespeed on our Shared Services
After thorough testing, we’ve decided not to offer it with our shared hosting products.
Our testing has shown very little speed benefit for a majority of the types of websites that we host. Additionally, due to the compression and caching implemented by mod_pagespeed, it can result in unintended side effects such as updates that don’t display right away, broken Javascript code, or even a website that will no longer properly display. Optimizing the configuration on a per-website basis can be tricky and problems caused by the module can be difficult to troubleshoot, leading to support delays. There are also performance concerns; the optimizations, caching and compression that mod_pagespeed can provide all require server-side resources to complete. Allowing a customer to enable these optimizations at the expense of available resources on a server is simply not conducive to a shared hosting environment.
As a result, we have concluded that mod_pagespeed simply is not a good fit for our shared hosting platform due to the complexities of configuring it for the many different types of sites that we host and because the gains are negligible.
We do, however, plan to offer it for our VPS products later this year where the configuration can be better tailored to individual sites and any additional resources required to optimize the websites on the VPS do not affect other customers on the server.
