They might not be wearing a mask and carrying a gun, but if you've got images on your web pages then they could be costing you a lot more money than you think every time a visitor looks at one. That's because image files are typically the biggest bandwidth user on any web page. Whenever a visitor's browser is displaying an image on your site, it's actually downloading that image to the local user's hard drive. When anything gets downloaded, it uses bandwidth and bandwidth costs money. The moral of that story is: The bigger the image the more bandwidth it consumes.

If you are hosting a popular photo gallery site, or you are an ISP with clients who have a lot of images on their sites, than it is entirely possible that most of your bandwidth is being eaten up by images!

Every good problem deserves a solution

There is a solution, however, and it's a relatively simple and easy solution at that. It's called image compression. What sounds like some sort of geek-speak is really just a simple procedure that squeezes the extra bloat out of web-hosted images without noticeably affecting their visual quality.

When an image gets compressed it naturally reduces the overall file size, and it's that file size which causes images to eat up so much bandwidth.

NOT compressing your images is a lot like leaving the water running in the sink while you brush your teeth. You're just pouring money down the drain.

The Trick to Simple, Image Compression

The key to saving wasted bandwidth and accelerating the image download process is to use automated image compression scripts that you simply install on your web server and forget about. The good ones will calculate image compression ratios on the fly and always deliver the smallest possible file size without sacrificing quality, and it will do it all by itself!

The end result is a bandwidth savings that can run as high as 50% or more on image-intensive sites. And THAT is a solution worth installing.

So whether you are an ISP who is looking to reduce the amount of bandwidth that your clients consume, or you are a webmaster who is paying way too much in bandwidth fees, the solution to expanding your wallet just could very well be compressing your images.
About the Author
Roderick Coleman is the developer of the powerful HTML/Image compressor available at http://www.optimizehosting.com . It 's a money-saving utility that ISPs can used to increase sales by giving the service to their clients, and webmasters can use to increase their site's performance, while reducing bandwidth usage.