The ZEIT Network layer implements two compression methods; Gzip and Brotli. We highly recommend leveraging ZEIT Network compression over a self hosted solution.
Using the provided compression methods will result in the best performance and least maintenance.
Any client that makes requests to your deployment needs to define the Accept-Encoding header to opt into compression. Many clients (browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Safari) already do this out of the box. If you're making a request from another type of client make sure you use the Accept-Encoding header to take advantage of compression.
As an example, this is how you ask the Network layer to compress using Brotli:
Accept-Encoding: br
An example Accept-Encoding header requesting Brotli compression.
If your client supports Brotli, we generally recommend using it over Gzip, because it usually performs much better.
Nevertheless, some clients might not support it, so to use Gzip:
Accept-Encoding: gzip
An example Accept-Encoding header requesting Gzip compression.
Assuming that the program requests deployment resources with the appropriate Accept-Encoding header, the response will be compressed automatically.