How much is it costing you to download that Internet page?
Written 2007/12/11, modified 2008/12/10
Feedback welcome: contact, email daveclarkecb@yahoo.com
Some of us have contracts where our download speed is cut right back after
our total download for the month reaches a certain point.
Or you might, like me, pay by the kilobyte for your internet connection.
Either way you need
to know which sites to avoid if you are not to pay more than you should.
How many pages can I download in a month if my monthly download limit
is 250MB?
| Page size | Number of pages
|
|---|
| 25kB | 10 000
| | 50kB | 5000
| | 100kB | 2500
| | 200kB | 1250
| | 400kB | 625
| | 800kB | 313
| | 1500kB | 167
| | 3000kB | 83
|
How much will it cost for a 40-page session if I'm paying $25 for
250MB?
| Page size | Cost per session
|
|---|
| 25kB | $0.10
| | 50kB | $0.20
| | 100kB | $0.40
| | 200kB | $0.80
| | 400kB | $1.60
| | 800kB | $3.20
| | 1500kB | $6.00
| | 3000kB | $12.00
|
|
A very large page of text might be only a few kilobytes.
Pages that come with a few modest pictures will probably get up into a
hundred kilobytes or more.
Excessive advertising and other overheads on some pages means that you
are downloading hundreds of kilobytes of rubbish that you
don't need, don't want, and that costs you money.
Other sites come with movie clips that can make your computer download
megabytes.
The data listed on this page show that some Internet page downloads
are less than 20kB while others are more than 3000kB (3MB).
Often it is very hard to see why there should be such a big difference;
the little page might have as much useful content as the big page.
When recording these data I found that as
far as on-line news was concerned, if the advertising
and other unnecessary clutter wasn't there I'd have no need for broadband.
For example, the text in an article I looked up in Fairfax's Canberra
Times was 6kB while to download the whole page including crap, my
computer logged up 605kB!
From my point of view, that's 99% rubbish, 1% content!
Sites like the Australian ABC on-line, Google News, Yahoo, Flickr,
Wikipedia, and even this page (about 25kB),
show that it is easy to write an Internet
page that is economical and quick to download.
I hope that this page might help to show a few people some of the pages
that can be economically used without worrying about crashing your download
limit and at least a few pages that should be avoided.
Statistics from downloading some Internet pages
|
In the tables below I compare the bytes needed to transfer the text
and image content with the size of the whole page download.
The times listed are for a 1.5Mbps 'broadband' connection.
|
| Pages that use your resources carefully are background colour
| Economical
|
| Pages that are extravagent with your money are tagged with yellow
| Extravagant
|
| Even worse are those marked in red
| Very extravagant
|
| Ridiculously large pages are marked in black
| Outrageous
|
| Page | KB | Time (sec) | Date | Notes
|
| Aust. National Forum
| 105
| 11 | 2008/01/22 | http://portal.nationalforum.com.au/
|
| 259 | 22 | 2008/01/22
| http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/
|
| 156 | 19 | 2008/01/22
| Posting in reply
|
| Blogspot - www.blogger.com
| 23 | 8 | 2007/12/26 | Home page
|
| 132 | 25 | 2007/12/26 | View a comment
|
| 556
| 43 | 2007/12/26
| To the 'Post a comment' page
|
| Eric Shackle's eBook | 136
| 22 | 2007/12/11 | Commentory (Aust.)
|
|
Gippsland Friends of Future Generations | 16
| 13 | 2008/01/19 | http://ffggippsland.blogspot.com/
|
| This page that you are reading now | 30
| 9 | 2007/12/22
| For comparison
|
| One of my biggest pages (RealUSA, on Geocities)
| 240 | 13 | 2007/12/11
| For comparison.
RealUSA contains about 70 screens-full of text, photos, and graphs.
|
|
It seems to me, at this stage, that many of the news services are
among the most irresponsible sites on
the Internet, in terms of advertising overhead that is wasting Net
resources and wasting user's money.
|
| Page | KB | Time (sec) | Date | Notes
|
| ExplorOz
| 977
| 58 | 2008/12/10 |
http://www.exploroz.com/Places/. A map site; similar to Google Earth
|
| 742
| 43 | 2008/12/10 |
Run a search. The high data transfer on this site may be unavoidable.
|
| Free online dictionary
| 16 | 9 | 2008/01/03 |
www.free-online-dictionary.org
|
| Open Directory | 34
| 8 | 2007/12/26 | To Home page (www.dmoz.org)
|
| Wikipedia | 60
| 10 | 2007/12/21 | To home page
|
| 22 | 4 | 2007/12/21 | Search
|
| Wikimedia (species) | 126
| 13 | 2007/12/24 | species.wikimedia.org
|
| Answers.com |
293 | 27 | 2007/12/24 |
My impression is that this site copies content that it finds elsewhere and
adds advertising.
|
|
| Page | KB | Time (sec) | Date | Notes
|
| Green Builder | 54
| 9 | 2007/12/27 | Home page (www.greenbuilder.com)
|
| 36 | 10 | 2007/12/27
| One of many informative pages on green and sustainable building
(www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/LandscapingEnergy.html)
|
| Green Building Worldwide
| 962
| 47 | 2007/12/26 | Home page
(www.greenbuildingworldwide.com)
|
| 460
| 26 | 2007/12/26 | Green buildings by country
|
| Green Living Pedia
| 1048
| 63 | 2007/12/26 | Home page (includes an interactive map)
(www.greelivingpedia.org)
|
| 283 | 28 | 2007/12/26
| CERES Eco House
|
| Page | KB | Time (sec) | Date | Notes
|
| Clusty | 27
| 5 | 2007/12/11 | Load search page
|
| 55 | 10 | 2007/12/11 | Run a search
|
| Google | 9
| 2 | 2007/12/11 | Load search page
|
| 11 | 3 | 2007/12/11 | Run a search
|
| MSN | 242
| 27 | 2008/01/20 | Load search page
|
| Page | KB | Time (sec) | Date | Notes
|
|
Aust. Bus. Council Sustainable Energy | 154
| 10 | 2007/12/25 | Home page
|
|
505 | 22 | 2007/12/25
| Wind projects page. Careless site writing; big images in small boxes.
|
Australian Greens
(Political party) |
3490+ | 130+
| 2007/12/11 | I stopped this download before it finished!
The page includes a highly extravagant movie.
|
| Crikey |
3637+
| 120+ | 2007/12/21 | To home page. Again, I stopped the
download.
|
| Dodo | 162
| 18 | 2007/12/25 | To home page
|
| Facebook | 12
| 10 | 2007/12/21 | Home page
|
| 228 | ~60 | 2008/05/17
| Home page; much slower than earlier connection
|
| GetUp! | 207 | 15
| 2007/12/22 | Community action group (Australia)
|
| Google Earth | 2900
| 200 | 2008/01/13 | Around the world and zoom in
|
| 1600 | | 2008/01/13 | Find exact location,
zoom in further, tilt
|
| The high data transfer is probably unavoidable in the
circumstances, but use Google Earth cautiously if you have data limits.
|
| Facebook |
429 | 28 | 2008/12/11
| Home page
|
| Flickr | 83 | 9
| 2007/12/11 | To home page
|
| 64 | 25 | 2007/12/21 | Organiser
|
| Jacquie Lawson Greeting Card |
835 | 33 | 2007/12/23
| Included sound recording and animation
|
| Popular Mechanics
| 1401
| ~90 | 2008/01/13 | An informative page
(http://www.popularmechanics.com/)
|
| W3C Markup Validation
Service
| 28 | 5 | 2007/12/26 | HTML checker, home page
|
| Yahoo mail | 47
| 12 | 2007/12/11 | To load log-on page
|
| 270 | 38
| 2007/12/11 | From log-on to mail in-box
|
On this page...
ABC (Aust)
ABC (US)
Adelaide Advertiser (Aust)
Adelaide Independent Media
Answers.com
Aust. Bus. Council Sustainable Energy
Aust. Greens
BBC
Blogs
Canberra Times (Aust)
Clare Northern Argus (S Aust)
Clusty
Crikey (Aust)
Dodo
Energy Central
Environmental reference
Facebook
Flickr
GetUp
Google Earth
Google News
Google search
Green Building
Green Building Worldwide
Green Living Pedia
London Times
Melbourne Herald Sun
Miscellaneous pages
News services
News services: local
Popular Mechanics
Port Lincoln Times (S Aust)
Reference
Search engines
Sydney Morning Herald
The Age (Aust)
The Australian
Top
W3C Markup Validation Service
Weather - BoM (Aust)
Weather services
Whyalla News
Wikimedia
Wikipedia
Yahoo mail
Yorke Peninsula Country Times (S Aust)
uk.weather.com
www.eldersweather.com.au