Is Your Favicon Hogging Your Hosting Bandwidth?

We all run cool favicons to highlight the brand of our websites and blogs on browser tabs and url bars. But have you ever checked the size of your favicon? Your beautiful favicon might be of a huge file size and could be the hidden cause of your increasing hosting bandwidth costs.

I read this article on Scott Hanselman Computer Zen, who was in for a surprise when he checked his bandwidth statistics.

“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.”

He switched to a simpler favicon with 3 resolutions at 16 colors which is under 4k, and saved his monthly bandwidth by 25GB. I never realized that Favicons could be so large.

I created my blog favicon using Microangelo Icon Editor. There are so many free online favicon creating tools, which can easily convert any image to a favicon, and it becomes essential you check the favicon size and optimize it, or a huge hosting bandwidth bill may surprise you.

Looking for free favicon hosting - Try MyFavatar.