Looking for VPS that supports Brotli

VPS that supports Brotli

So I've been running this personal blog for about three years now and it's gotten to the point where I'm really trying to optimize every last byte and I keep reading about Brotli compression and how it's like 20% better than gzip and I thought well my current host doesn't support it and I asked their support and they said no plans and I started looking around and I checked Contabo and Hostinger and basically none of them list Brotli on their VPS specs and I know it's a niche thing but my blog is text heavy and I do a lot of markdown and code blocks and I figured someone here would know and I also looked at KnownHost but their cheapest plan is VPS only and I don't want to manage a server and I was thinking maybe I should just go with a CDN but I want the origin to support it too and I k

Brotli didn't exist then—we had gzip and we were grateful. I remember compiling nginx from source in 2014 to get gzip_static working. These days I use Vultr's VPS tier but honestly for a text blog, gzip at level 6 was fine for a decade. The obsession with marginal gains reminds me of when everyone switched to SPDY. Most of it was security theater for page scores.

Hey folks

Just a gentle reminder that we have a dedicated "performance" subforum if this gets deep into CDN architecture. 🙂

Have you considered whether you actually need origin Brotli? Cloudflare's free tier will Brotli-compress on their edge even if your origin only serves gzip. The browser sees Brotli regardless. For a 2000-visit blog, the origin compression format matters less than you'd think.

A $5 VPS from RackNerd, docker compose with nginx:alpine, and the ngx_brotli module compiled in. Reverse proxy through Cloudflare if you want. I run this stack for six sites. Total control, no waiting for shared host support tickets. Shared hosting will always be five years behind because they can't risk breaking legacy PHP 5.6 sites. Docker compose makes migrations trivial. The "I don't want to manage a server" mindset costs you more in limitations than learning basic nginx config.

We actually support Brotli on our Pro and Business tiers