Do the brownrice servers support mod_gzip?
In Apache2 - which is the web server Brownrice uses - mod_deflate has replaced Apache 1.3's mod_gzip.
mod_deflate is loaded and enabled on all of our servers.
See http://www.howtoforge.com/apache2_mod_deflate for usage.
Add this line to your docs/.htaccess file to enable:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript
The directives and be set via .htaccess, but if you need anything changed in a vhost please email.