A quick lesson on bandwidth

Let’s start with the problem:

The main page of Liquid Designs shows the latest ten entries. Each entry features a 300 x 170 pixel screenshot of the site.

Originally I was saving these images at full quality. I figured, they are small enough, 20 kb each, no problem. I also had never dealt with high traffic before.

Then I found the stats page. Let’s do some math.

The total amount of data for 10 of these JPG images at full quality is 323 kb. That’s just these 10 images.

Looking at my stats for the past 24 hours, I can estimate that the main page gets, at worst, 50 unique visits every hour. Math time: 50 visits x 323 kb = 16.15 mb. At 24 hours in a day and 30 days in a month, that’s 11.628 gb of data. 11.628 gb, for one site on a server where I have all my sites hosted. That’s considering that I have a good hosting plan, which allows me, a poor college student with no income, to get 120 gb of bandwidth every month. Still, the possibility of having 10% of my bandwidth consumed every month by 10 JPG images on one page of a website is really bad!

Time to solve the problem. Enter FastStone Photo Resizer. It’s free, easy to use, and very good at optomizing images for the web. Did I mention it’s free?

Batch processing the ten images to reduce the total size to 143 kb equals a reduction in monthly bandwidth usage to only 4.85 gb. That’s a savings of 6.78 gb, or 5.6% of my total allowed bandwidth. Big help, right?

Hopefully that gives you a good understanding of the real impact of page sizes. For a corporate example of the benefits of saving a few kb, you can view this presentation by StopDesign.