FavIcon.ico can be a bandwidth hog… if it’s 70K.
This is a good reason to remember that no everyone has a fast connection also.
I got an email from ORCSWEB, my most excellent hosting company (check them out) that I’d used over 230 GIGs of bandwidth for the month. Oy. First, I was happy that the site is doing well, then I was disturbed. Something MUST be wrong.
Notice anything odd there? Yes, my favicon.ico used 27 GIGS of bandwidth in the month. Yikes.
Turns out my icon was 70k, as I made it a wonderful high-quality “Vista” icon in an attempt to make things pleasant and everything for folks. Of course, I didn’t noticed when it was taking up over 11% of my monthly bandwidth.
Using 230G of bandwidth is impressive. 25G for favicon.ico is just amazing.
A notice to readers: I’ll be updating my FavIcon.ico to a 250K icon later today.
Now that’s impressive! According to my calculations (27GB/70kB * 1024MB/GB * 1024 kB/MB), that guy’s favicon was downloaded more than 400,000 times. I can think of two good questions:
Why would anybody want or need a favicon more than a few kB? IE 7 doesn’t seem to do anything special with them as far as I can tell.
Aren’t favicons usually cached by browsers? Or are they downloaded once per visit, once per pageview, once per session…? Would be nice if Web browsers first looked for a favicon.md5 file (or something similar) to see if the favicon had actually changed before downloading it. Browsers could support that pretty easily and it would save this poor guy (and others like him) a lot of money. Just a thought…