How many graphic files should my games have

[compuken]

My artist is very talented and I would like to place most of her art she has made, but I am contimplating how much this would slow things down? The game is like kings of chaos and I am of course having quite a bit of work on the index.php file and help and register, but the main game files? I am going to have a banner and some banner on the left and right side but what about a few graphics in the body of the page? How much do you think this will effect : bandwidth, game appeal, game speed?

[Zeggy]

Hmm, might depend on how fast your server is and how much bandwidth you have.

[compuken]

Well after evaluating godaddy's speed I think I will host my game somewhere else. I am renting a virtual server from godaddy and paid extra for a ram boost but either I am not getting all my ram or someone on the server is abusing it since when I log into plesk it shows 60megs available for the whole server, and a few times my site (with low traffic) has been very slow.

I have hosted with bluehost.com before and still have a site with them, but right now they are going through a lot of changes or have just finished them, so I don't know if I should host my main game with them.

What has been the fastest host that you have heard of? I would be willing to pay a bit extra if the server speed is worth it.

[Zeggy]

http://www.hostingspeeds.com/

For me it looks like HardFocus Media is the fastest, based in Japan with their servers in Canada.
I checked their website and I don't think they are an 'international' hosting service because their prices are in Yen and I don't see any purchasing forms.

Oh well, go for another one then

[compuken]

good site but looks like canada is the fastest severs, but I wonder if the site is hosted in canada and is only going by the location its at?

[Zeggy]

These are the servers where the hosting speeds are measured from:
http://www.hostingspeeds.com/index.php?act=checklocations

[compuken]

Thanks that will help, now just to find some reviews on the host LOL

[dvd871]

You should avoid using godaddy if at all possible.  They have less than ideal php setups on their servers that will cause you problems.  Just search the web for godaddy.com hosting reviews and look at the number of horror stories.  If you are looking for a new host then do yourself a favor and look at www.webhostingtalk.com forums.  You'll find whatever you need there.

[Bugsy]

You should avoid using godaddy if at all possible.  They have less than ideal php setups on their servers that will cause you problems.  Just search the web for godaddy.com hosting reviews and look at the number of horror stories.  If you are looking for a new host then do yourself a favor and look at www.webhostingtalk.com forums.  You'll find whatever you need there.

hmm.. looks like a good information

[Sakurazaki]

Depends on how much bandwith you have, also you have to keep in mind your users' limitations. It may load fast for you, but not for others. :3

[Chris]

The gfx files in my game uses 5% of the bandwidth (95% is html+css) so I would say it's irrelevant bandwidth wise (most players will have these cached anyway). The same goes for speed (althrough I would limit myself here, it's important to new visitors to keep it reasonable).

As for shared host I recommend bluerazor.com (reseller of godaddy). The funniest thing is they are faster than competition even though they use CGI to run PHP insted of Apache (so it should be slow in theory...)

[Josh1billion]

MySQL server speeds should be your main concern when it comes to speed.  After that, PHP load.  Finally, transfer bandwidth (images/text/files).

I recommend LunarPages.

[onebigcelt]

so can also cut down on the time that your images take to load by limiting the number of images to download and use css to crop larger images and target just the areas you need... works great on icons buttons and header etc

[overklokan]

http://www.hostingspeeds.com/

For me it looks like HardFocus Media is the fastest, based in Japan with their servers in Canada.
I checked their website and I don't think they are an 'international' hosting service because their prices are in Yen and I don't see any purchasing forms.

Oh well, go for another one then

fastest is definitely www.datapipe.com and that's confirmed on many web sites that
test response time (check yourself, you'll be amazed by their speed) ... hosting there
is very expensive but we can't have all for cheap, right?

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/11/19/datapipe_and_rackspace_are_the_most_reliable_hosting_companies_in_october_2007.html
http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters

@onebigcelt - indeed, CSS sprites are great! not only that they reduce kB you need to transfer
but by using them one can SERIOUSLY reduce number of server requests (with many users
online it usually means lag versus no lag)

also, don't forget AJAX ... it can be used to download images in background, without showing
them before they need to be shown ... by "clever guessing" where user might navigate (unless
we speak about those at 56kbps), one can cut website perceived response time a lot ...

other trick (which don't quite work if user is on slow connection) is spreading your images over
multiple subdomains ... HTTP 1.1 specification limits browsers to 2 simultaneous request, which
means that if you have a lot of graphic files, user of your website might need to wait even if
he have very fast connection! by spreading your images over main domain + 2 subdomains you
can increase number of simultaneous downloads to 6 ...