Singapore Web Hosting Blog

every now and then, i receive enquiries regarding speed of web page loading.

recently a client emailed me asking why their page had been very slow to be displayed, and his is in singapore. server load is fine. i myself felt that his page was indeed rather slow, although not using database, no java applet, no scripting, just static html, not very graphic intensive - in the surface.

when i looked at his files, the only image on the page was unbelievable 800+kb in size, while the html file itself was 200kb+. that’s 1MB+ data for one simple page, how can the page be loaded fast? it may take a few minutes to download if visitor is using dial-up, although not many people use dial-up.

but hey, even for broadband users, 1MB is way toooooo big for a simple web page. it’s very slow, and it wastes your hosting account bandwidth.

so how to make your web site load faster and save bandwidth? before i go into optimized html coding in more detail, let me address two things that might be so obvious that people ignore then often.

first, you have to optimize or compress your images. you cannot take a picture using digital camera and simply put it on your web page. you have to reduce image resolution, compromise image quality, and get optimized image files. the 800+kb image file above mentioned can easily be reduced to 100kb without noticeable quality loss.

if you use photoshop, choose “save for web” option to save the image file. there should be similar functions in other image processing software. or there’re online image optimizers, just search for it.

secondly, use web page authorizing software to code your web pages. i know microsoft word offers a handy function to export word file into html format and it looks fine on web site most of the time. however the problem is, it generates tons of rubbish code. in the example above, the html file can be reduced to 15kb maximum, which means more than 90% of the file is rubbish code.

think about it, and count all pages on your web site. if you do not optimize your html files and images, how much bandwidth you have wasted? and how many visitors you’ve lost because they do not want to wait?

oops, this post became longer than what i expected. will continue in next post.

just found that BMW site is banned by Google ! this is why i love google !

do a search for “bmw.de” in google at this moment, you get nothing returned. according to Matt, a software engineer in google who shares extreamely valuable information on his blog, it’s removed from google index because of fishy javascript redirects on bmw.de web site which is a violation of google’s quality guidelines, specifically the principle of “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”

it’s good to know that BMW is caught by google, and google does not hesitate to remove such a big brand name from their index. it’s BMW! although there might be stories under the table that we never know, at least it shows that google is willing to make it a fair game for everybody.

it reminds me another recent case that US government demanding last year that Google and other search engines turn over search information to help revive a child protection law. yahoo and msn has handed over the info. however google said no.

what the government wanted was one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches over one week time.

it’s not that the one million random URL involves privacy issues. anybody can get 1 million ramdom urls simply by browsing. what i appreciate is that google treats everyone the same way.

at least, they try to. surely there’re background stories that everage joe like myself would never know. however, how many big guys even try to cast an image that they care about us, small businesses, individuals? very few.

i like the way google said to bmw and government, hey we don’t like dirty tricks like cloaking, your using it? fine, but your gone from my index. you want my information? no, it’s not my resposibility to provide these to you. they are firm on what they should do and what not to do. as a small fish, i see hope here. the playground is leveled.

update: after i finished this post, bmw.de has been back to google index after the redirects are removed and reinclusion is filed. this is fast, for both bmw and google.

luckily i screen captured yesterday when i started writing this post:

according to NYTimes,

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered.

read the original report here.

that’s a bold move that may cause other problems.

according to the report, this special treatment includes “go straight to users’ main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links.” but isn’t that what would happen exactly when you send a legitimate email (except that it would go through spam filters)?

how would they justify the fees when people have been sending emails with no problem for free? i’m talking about legitimate emails here, not spams. when i send emails to my friends that use AOL or Yahoo email addresses, they should reach their inboxes without delay, as long as i’m not spamming.

if my emails get filtered to junk mail folder or completely filtered out, it’s their spam filter’s fault, not mine. how would they convince me to pay when THEIR system is malfunctioning?

more interestingly, what would happen to unpaid emails when the postage system is put into place? get delivered as usual? then back to point above, why should i pay? go through more filters so that some of legitimate emails must be filtered out in order to show how important the postage is? that’s simply not right. if that happens, i would expect people dropping their AOL or Yahoo address.

a bigger concern is, will it solve spam issue? most likely no. in offline world, postage is more expensive, yet we receive ads, mail order, catolog, etc. daily in letterbox. if by paying postage, emails will be guaranteed to be delivered bypassing spam filter, tons of spammers would start paying and get their spam emails delivered.

spams are still spams. spam emails would not become legitimate because they’re paid.

i guess their logic is, spammers would not pay because they are spammers. but my logic is, spammers do not spam for the sake of spam. they do it for profit. as long as there’s profit, why not pay for the postage? if they cannot afford “1/4 of a cent to a penny” for a guaranteed reader, they are in wrong business.

what if someone pay and send phishing email?

Paying senders will be assured that their messages will be delivered to AOL users’ main in-boxes and marked as “AOL Certified E-Mail.”

some really unfortunate thing may happen then.

of course, it would reduce the number of spams for sure. if snail mail is free, people would find hundreds of ads in mailbox everyday instead of a few.