How to make gzip work on 1and1 shared host WordPress site

Question

YSlow is telling me that my css should be compressed, but after several hours of tinkering, I cannot for the life of me get gzip to work for my website. At this point, I'm not even sure if the performance increase (will there be one?) will be worth the effort.

I'm running a WordPress site on a 1&1 shared hosting account.

Honestly, I don't really know what I'm doing with this stuff, and can't seem to get an appropriate setup. I read in a few places that with 1&1, "modules Apache mod_deflate and mod_gzip are not installed.", so I assume this is part of the problem.

I have tried the following code:

This one doesn't seem to do anything:

<IfModule mod_gzip.c>  
    mod_gzip_on         Yes  
    mod_gzip_dechunk    Yes  
    mod_gzip_item_include file          \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$  
    mod_gzip_item_include handler       ^cgi-script$  
    mod_gzip_item_include mime      ^text\.*  
    mod_gzip_item_include mime      ^application/x-javascript.*  
    mod_gzip_item_exclude mime      ^image\.*  
    mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*  
</IfModule>  

This causes a 500 error

<Location />
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>

This (from html5 boilerplate) doesn't seem to do anything either:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

  # Force deflate for mangled headers developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/12/pushing-beyond-gzipping/
  <IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
      SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-]{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding
      RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding "gzip,deflate" env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding
    </IfModule>
  </IfModule>

  # HTML, TXT, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, XML, HTC:
  <IfModule filter_module>
    FilterDeclare   COMPRESS
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/html
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/css
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/plain
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/x-component
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/javascript
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/json
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/xhtml+xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/rss+xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/atom+xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/vnd.ms-fontobject
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $image/svg+xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $image/x-icon
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/x-font-ttf
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $font/opentype
    FilterChain     COMPRESS
    FilterProtocol  COMPRESS  DEFLATE change=yes;byteranges=no
  </IfModule>


  <IfModule !mod_filter.c>
    # Legacy versions of Apache
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css application/json
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml application/xml text/x-component
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/atom+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon image/svg+xml application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/x-font-ttf font/opentype
  </IfModule>

</IfModule>

This one Doesnt seem to do anything...

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript

I followed the tutorial found here

(http://mrrena.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-to-compress-php-and-other-text.html) 

but this essentially completely broke the appearance of my site.

---

Tried this in my Functions.php, and it seemed to compress my html, but leaves some js and css uncompressed

if(extension_loaded("zlib") && (ini_get("output_handler") != "ob_gzhandler"))
    add_action('wp', create_function('', '@ob_end_clean();@ini_set("zlib.output_compression", 1);'));