My site has been moved to a new server recently, and now it's having some serious issues with response time. I have to wait 4+ seconds for the site to begin loading when navigating to the homepage.
I traced it down to mod_deflate. If I disable gzipping HTML, it's fine, otherwise the 4+ seconds response time is there again. Only compressing the HTML seems to be the problem, not CSS, JS or any other files.
Everything worked like charm on the old server, and I haven't changed any setting. What should I do to let Apache GZIP the HTML without this slowdown?
ps. please note my site is on a shared hosting and I do not have access to httpd.conf or PHP ini settings. I can edit .htaccess only.