Hi, We have a travel website that has lots of images on the home page. How cna we optimize it to render it fast.. ? Should we be hosting the images on different server like Amazon that will render it fast .. ? Or any other method ?
Hosting on cloud can be an option... ie. AWS from Amazon. Instead of that, try compressing the images in JPEG format, try different compression levels, but as you said you've huge number of images, it might be a tough task to compress all of them. Try finding a batch processor, like one in paint shop pro 9, it lets you convert multiple files to a particular format with compression settings altered as per your needs. Putting images over different servers would definitely reduce load.
upload images to tinypic.com or some imagehosting site or use IFRAME for pictures that aren't on your server
The best way is to have all of your images "cached" by your visitor's browser so that once loaded once, they don't have to be loaded again- their browser will just pull the cached image, which will load MUCH faster and helps cut down on your bandwidth too. Here's how to do it: Automatically cache images