By using the mod_deflate (link) module of apache you can quite easily reduce a 30k page down to 3k worth of transmitted data, and guess what it is extremely simple to enable!

To enable the module (apache2) try something like:

# cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
# ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/deflate.load .

Then add the following line to your apache.conf

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

Now restart apache and all plain text, html, and xml files should be compressed before being sent to the client.

Easy!