The dangers of going with an attractively cheap website hosting package often involves the bandwidth even if your provider claims you have “unlimited” bandwidth. Cheap web hosting packages involve the use of shared servers so you will still be spoiling the fun for other webmasters if your site isn’t so optimized and hogging more bandwidth than it should be. Compressing your images to reduce the file sizes is just scratching the surface; there are a couple of other nifty tricks as well.
First, you have to realize just how powerful CSS has gotten. With CSS3, it is already possible to create your own textured button complete with rounded corners. All you need is a small piece of the texture so it can tile and a few lines of CSS to get the job done. Gone are the days of designing the button using Photoshop. Saving a few kilobytes can make a big difference if you are expecting hundreds of visitors every day.
Not all of your visitors are human though. There might be a Google bot that is scanning your images so if your site offers a lot of imagery and you don’t mind that it doesn’t show up in Google Images, you can block the bot and save bandwidth. The following code should be added to your “robots.txt” file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /
But what if you have several non-image files on your website that people download? Dealing with that is pretty simple, just open up an account that offers cloud hosting like Dropbox or Box.net and upload those files there. Having multiple mirrors of these downloadable files ensure that lots of visitors can download files smoothly without putting your bandwidth in danger.