We've been housekeeping on the servers in the last few days.  You've got some big files on there - and fair enough, we don't limit bandwidth or webspace, so there's no problem. 

There's a "but" coming you say.

Well yes, there is an issue, for you really - not us.  We've noticed some of our clients using very large image files on their websites - some are as large as 5Mb!! (that's over 3 floppy disks capacity in old currency).  The issue only arises if you include these images on your pages - you're forcing your website visitors to download them - this will take a long long time even with a reasonable connection speed. It's almost certain they won't wait for the page to load so that's traffic and potential business that you've lost.  Worse still, it leaves that particular server reeling, which impacts service for other clients on the the same server.

Image files used in a page should really be no bigger than 50kb, but smaller if you want to include a number of images on the same page, for example, pictures of your people on your About Us page.

Don't just take a picture from your digital camera and upload it. Instead resize it in an image editing application first.  If you don't know how to do this, a very useful trick is to send the images to yourself by email (works with Windows and Outlook). Select the images in Windows Explorer, then right click on them and select "Send To"... and then "Mail Recipient" on the sub menu that appears.  If you send the pictures as 640 x 480 px, they will come back to you as high quality images, but will be massively reduced in size.