There’s a certain area of my personal site that gets a lot of hits. It contains quite a few images, all read from a folder, and I was worried about the amount of bandwidth these images were using. Looking at the statistics, they were using a lot. An awful lot.
I just spent 15 minutes compressing the images using the GIMP, and in so doing shaved 230 kiloytes off the image folder size. Let’s say the page that reads this image folder gets hit 200 times per day. 200 x 230 kilobytes = 46 megabytes (give or take a bit). And over a month of 30 days that works out at a whopping 1380 megabytes, or 1.3 gigabytes.
That’s huge! Monstrous! Whopping! The in my bandwidth usage could be massive.
Whether it will pan out like that I can’t say. I’ll certainly be paying close atention to my website statistics packges over the next week to see what the difference is, but on paper this looks like 15 minutes extremely well spent. In fact, I’d say that optimising images (and HTML code, and CSS, and JavaScript – basically anything that gets downloaded) could make a massive difference if you pay for your website bandwidth.
One compny I know stands to halve it’s yearly bandwidth bill of over £15000 because it’s rewriting its site using web standards. If that’s not ROI I don’t know what is.
(My maths is probably way out, so if you want to correct me please do. I’m only a geek; what do you expect – intelligence?)