Bandwidth and signature banner

[Guest SD Sim]

Greetings All,I recently created my first signature banner. I host the banner on my own site, but I have a question I'm hoping that someone can answer for me. Does the link for the signature banner take up more bandwidth than if I simply had text in my signature? I'm thinking of improving my signature, but if I'm sucking up more AVSIM bandwidth than I would with text alone, then I'm inclined to go without the banner. Sorry for the naive question, but I don't know how else to get the answer :-wave

[Guest]

David, your sig that you are using right now is just over 11kb which is just fine in my opinion. As far as which takes up more, an image or just text. Text in your sig will use much less by a long shot, but I realize most don't want to be limited to just text for their sig.As for hosting off your site, this is the best way to do it so you don't have to worry about your image being removed from our server when we do our regular cleanup jobs.The problem with bandwidth that has been stated before has less to do with where it is linked to as to how many kb's has to be downloaded by a user's computer to view your post. Those that have very large sigs or post way too many images in one message cause a big slowdown for those still using dialup modems. There are still quite a few of those people and we try to respect the trouble they may have downloading all these bloated messages. Those of us on high-speed connections tend to forget how very slow dialups were. You are on cable and have a nice efficient size sig. You are many steps ahead of others already as far as I'm concerned. :-)Thanks for using the forums and thanks for trying to help us out by inquiring about your sig.

[Guest]

Scott,Even the high speed users are getting hurt now, a lot of service providers are now introducing a 5 Gig cap per month (unlimited doesn't really mean unlimited anymore), with additional billing for excess use ...Linking the banners to external sites instead of putting them on AVSim allows users to use various tools to block them showing up, saving on the bandwidth so the external linking does actually offer a benefit apart from keeping your bandwidth costs down ;-)Ray

[Guest SD Sim]

Thanks for the information Scott. I'll keep the signature banner small in the future (if I do ever find the time to improve it).