Most popular web server support serving contents using GZIP, at the same time most popular web browsers recognize GZIP header and decompress the files on the fly.
Even though Amazon S3 has most of the features of a full-fledged web server, it lacks transparently supporting GZIP. In another way, you have to manually compress the files using GZIP and setup the Content-encoding header to GZIP.
Why Should I Care About GZIP?
Well, first of all, GZIP helps you to serve your web content faster. HTML pages being a simple text file can compress up to 20% of the original size and thus can be served 5(!) times faster. As a result, making the user experience much better!
What’s more, with Amazon S3 it is much more important because you have to pay storage and transfer costs. Just imagine your monthly bills can get down to 20% if you store your content compressed and serve it using GZIP.
How Can MSP360 Explorer PRO Help?
MSP360 Explorer PRO compression uses the GZIP algorithm, so all files copied to Amazon S3 could be available through HTTP 1.1. It means that if you need to put HTML file to s3 you have to turn compression ON and copy files. To turn compression on going to Tools Options Advanced and check the appropriate checkbox.
The file will be placed to s3 with the appropriate HTTP header set automatically:
Content-Encoding=gzip
To verify the header select the file that you’ve copied to S3 and click Set HTTP Headers on the toolbar. You will see the Content-Encoding header in the list set to GZIP.
Chunking should be off if you want to serve your files through HTTP. It is off by default as of version 1.5.2, but older customers should check Tools| Options| Advanced.
MSP360 was inspired by the blog post Serve gzipped content from Amazon S3 and we would like to thank you the author David Arthur for the idea and for mentioning MSP360 Explorer in his blog.
Further reading Please also check out Serving GZipped javascript files from Amazon CloudFront by Ken Weiner for more info on the subject
Conclusion
MSP360 Explorer PRO makes it extremely easy to serve to GZIP content from Amazon S3. You don’t have to do anything special, just turn compression on and everything else will happen automatically.
If you came to this post by chance you should know that MSP360 S3 Explorer PRO is a Windows product that you can download here. It also has a freeware edition, so hurry up and get your copy!
