Maybe creating a great group isn’t that tough if you hire right but it’s often tough hiring right. It’s not the matter of making proper decisions. It’s about not being able to find these people you’ve described so easily.
I don't see my previous comment but I suppose it will pop out eventually. Anyway, I have a minor addition to it. The first recommendation (with .htaccess) works for me, the second doesn't. I had to point this out because someone may think my VPS is incapable of doing any compression.
The point of avoiding .htaccess in my case is that I don't wish to compress everything. I want just one include in the PHP file I wish to compress and nothing in others...
And, Andreas, having in mind what Dustin wrote and the fact that, as well as decompression, compression also takes time, you should really compress everything. For instance, I have a 4 kB dynamic page. Sure I am not going to compress it. What's the purpose? It's not going to load faster...