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Images undoubtedly make up a large percentage of data, reportedly up to 65% of the total bytes that makes up the data on the Web.

In its efforts to make the Web faster, Google has come up with a new file format, known as WebP to further compress the file size of these image files.

What is WebP?

WebP is a method of lossy compression that can be used on photographic images. WebP offers compression that has shown 39.8% more byte-size efficiency than JPEG for the same quality in a large scale study of 900,000 images on the Web. The degree of compression is adjustable so a user can choose the trade-off between file size and image quality.

A WebP file consists of VP8 image data, and a container based on RIFF. Webmasters, web developers and browser developers can use the WebP format to create smaller, better looking images that can help make the web faster.

Why should you use WebP?

By using WebP, you can:

• Provide a faster user experience on your site.
• Reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs.
• Improve the web!

The smaller file sizes would also make the transfer of images much faster, as well as enable storage of more images for a smaller amount of disk space.

Samples of the converted files can be viewed on this page (in a PNG container as browsers do not yet support the WebP file format)

Cloud hosting is a web hosting service delivered from a group of connected servers. The term cloud hosting (also called clustered hosting) is not precisely defined yet.

In general, however, a hosting service can be considered cloud hosting when it is delivered from a fully redundant, multi-server system, in which the resources are dynamically scalable and often virtualized.

In less technical terminology, cloud hosting uses a number of servers all connected together (a cloud), and sites on the servers can use resources from all the servers in that cloud. Processing power, hard drives, and memory are shared. Servers can be easily added or removed as necessary, and if one server is down, sites use resources from other servers instead.

A cloud hosting service is usually delivered from a load-balanced cluster server platform, while the data is stored in a SAN (Storage Area Network).

Cloud hosting providers measure compute cycles, an indicator which measures how much processing time applications require. This enables cloud hosting to be provided and billed as a part of a different service model than that used by other web hosting services. Clients pay for actual resources needed.

SiteCloud is currently offering cloud based hosting at a very affordable price, from $5.95/month. Click here for details.