Bandwidth

[Justin]

I know that if a site goes over a gig a day, then it's too much, so I have a question. Do you provide dedicated servers yet? If so, is it really expensive? You also mentioned something about putting my program on an ftp site, which I would have no problem with as long as it's as reliable as FQ (or even just close), so is there an extra cost involved there?

Just out of curiosity...


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Justin Nelson, SFE Inc.
http://www.vdj.net

[Deb]

No we do not offer dedicated yet... that's still months away.....

If we were to place your program on the FTP server you would still be with FQuest it's just that rather then running the Apache server the download would be handled by the FTP server.... nothing that's needed at this point in time. Your site is still well within the limits of a community server... nothing to worry about.

If we were to put your software directly on the FTP server there would be no charge for that.. you'd just have to change your link to it that's all...

We're also addressing some of these issues with the server upgrades etc that we are going through now... I wouldn't stress any of it at this point simply because to date you're all doing fine and we're simply going to improve http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif

Deb

[meikel]

Hi,

I think, the idea of FTP site is to use one of the publicly available sites. I did this with FreeMem (before I had my own domain) and it was very ok. I uploaded to the SimTel archive and the file distributed over hundreds of FTP-servers worldwide. So I was able to offer lots of alternative download locations.

Advantages:
1) Higher visiblity of the program. Many people scan these archives regularily, place the stuff on CDs and so on.
2) Extremly high reliability. This means 100%. One of the servers is always available.

Disadvantages:
Updates are a bit difficult to handle, because the download link changes all the time. That would make many download links from other sites invalid.

Maybe it's an additional way of distribution.

Greetings from Bonn, Germany
[nbsp][nbsp]Meikel Weber
http://www.meikel.com

[Justin]

I have uploaded to Simtel's ftp before, and since then have submitted an update. This was two versions ago, and they are still listing only the very old first version. Besides that, I know of not one person here in the US that has been able to download my program successfully from any of the 35 sites listed at shareware.com. They all show a low reliability rating, and not one of them is in the US (there might have been one or two).

Not that I don't appreciate the advice http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif , but that's one of the reasons I wanted a domain. I do have the file hosted at my ISP as well, and download.com's listing shows that one first. Hopefully that will split the load a little.

As for ZDNet, they will host it as well, but they will not accept a file with the Visual Basic runtimes. I will not distribute my app without them, as nobody reads the readme file, ever, they just click setup.exe and if it doesn't work, I get emails about it. So that Idea's out.

Then there's Tucows, who only accepts internet related software. So there's my options. I have looked into all of these possibilities, and I don't like having the program out of my control - I want to know that if I update, it's updated everywhere at the same time, like the other day. Winfiles, Download, File Dudes, Cnet, everywhere that my file is listed got updated in the same day, and amazingly they all updated their listing same day as well. I like a large impact, and judging by my stats, it worked like a charm http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif

Oh, another option would be to use some of the free websites. I was on Geocities before I came here, and there's two problems. One, it can't be an EXE file, only Zip. Two: reliability. You can always connect with no problem, but halfway through the download it says it's complete, even though it's not. Because of this, there's no resuming. Even getright can't get a 7 meg file from geocities.

So basically, it's at two places for now, and Deb says the bandwidth isn't too bad. I was just worried because it has quadrupled from two days ago, and it's still going up. I guess I'm over hopefull http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif

Ok, I've rambled quite enough now. I've been typing all day, redesigning my site completely from scratch in notepad! I guess the momentum has carried over to here.


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Justin Nelson, SFE Inc.
http://www.vdj.net

[meikel]

Hi again,

I never had problems with these archives. I offerd the ftp.cdrom.com location for main download and the shareware.com page for alternate locations. Maybe the main difference is that my program was around 740KB (not reaching an MB).

I've now optimized my setup by using INF-Tool. Now the download-zip is only 272KB which comes near to a graphics web-page and I'm sure it's not a problem.

For your 7MB files...
Maybe it would be an idea to distribute an "update" version for download. So if the user had installed your older versions and has running that correctly, you can assume he already has all runtimes. The update can then only include your program and the new runtimes. I'm sure that this could reduce the file-size immensely.

Greetings from Bonn, Germany
[nbsp][nbsp]Meikel Weber
http://www.meikel.com

[Justin]

Problem is that the new version uses an updated VB6 runtime, as well as DX Media 6.0, as opposed to 5.2 in the old version. It won't work with the older runtimes. DX 6 gives my program better performance when fading two songs together, and the new VB6 runtime is a bug fix from M$, and that would only save ~1MB anyway. The DX 6 stuff alone is 3 megs, and the other 3M is actual program.

In a future version, if MS doesn't change things around again, I probably will offer an upgrade version, but it would only upgrade from the current version, and not an older one.


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Justin Nelson, SFE Inc.
http://www.vdj.net