demo hosting

Need some advice.

I have an 80meg game demo I need hosted.

I have purchased some web hosting here in New Zealand (and domain name www.tankuniversal.com). This comes with 6GB a month traffic, but that only works out to about 100 downloads per month (internet traffic rates are expensive down here). After that I think I'm paying about $2NZD for every demo downloaded - so don't want that!

So what's the best hosting method? Don't need full website hosting (already got that) - but want something reliable and which won't bother people with popup ads or the like.

you could host the file somewhere else and just link to it from your site.

I have 2.5Tb of traffic monthly available to me on my various domains with 1&1 and another terabyte or so on another hosting package I have. I could host it for you.

You could also submit it to GamersHell.com.

Kanati/Knotz

2.5 Terabytes?!!

I've had 1&1 recommended elsewhere - I think I'll buy web hosting with 1&1 (thanks for the offer Kanati) but also upload to places like gamershell.com and filefront.com - that way I get the best of all worlds.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

6GB?
Even BlueHost has offered 3TB per account, I use not that much tho.

I'd recommend ShareBig.com if your demo has continous download.

Furthermore, I can host it on my site for you as mirror.

yoko

ShareBig.com looks kind of dodgy - it has adverts for russian brides on its front page?

Internet hosting sucks here in NZ. Actually, doing some more investigation, I've found this outfit;

http://www.fileburst.com
(I see, for example, that the outfit that made Wonderland Adventures uses them.)

But doing some math;

1 month x 1000 demo downloads x 80 megs per download
= 80gigs approx

80gigs x 1USD (fileburst pricing) = $80USD.

Game sells at 18USD

Means I'd have to sell about 5 copies out of those 1000 downloads just to cover file costs. That converts to about .5% of downloads. A typical conversion rate (so I read) is about %1.

I guess this is just an issue with having a relatively large demo download (80megs).

But perhaps I can also mitigate traffic costs by uploading to places like filefront/gamershell and having those links more prominently displayed.

Kanati/ypkp - I might also yet take you up on your link offers ;-)

Upload.com and Tucows will host your demo for you too. You don't have a casual game so a link to FileFront, Download.com, etc is unlikely to put anyone off.

Don't get hosting from a NZ company though. There's really no benefit ( indeed a possible cost because most of your downloads will come from outside NZ and because of the geography may be unnecessarily slow ) and if bandwidth is expensive in NZ, then you want to buy it from the US, where it's dirt cheap. I think I pay about $7 per month for 3Tb of bandwidth.

syntaxbomb provides a free FTP service:-

http://www.syntaxbomb.com/forum/index.php/topic,575.msg4278.html

Talk to Qube about the 80mb file size (There's usually 50mb for each member, but this isnt set in stone), he'll be glad to help, I'm sure!

Dabz

www.servage.com is the best, you get 3200 GB per month for 6€uros...

Like it's rediculous. It's somewhat decent if you live close to the Sky Tower, but pretty much useless everywhere else.

I can mirror it for you too. Also you could seed it on various BitTorrent networks.

Yep - the other thing that's poor is the upload times. 150kbps sounds like alot, but it seems to equate to about 1.5 hours to upload 80megs to a local NZ server?! Ridiculous.

In terms of demo file hosting, I've gone with Fileburst ($1USD per gig) + Filefront. I'll see how things go but keep your offer/s in mind - cheers!

The updated websites's at
www.tankuniversal.com

I'll happily host that for you if you'd like. No popups, ads etc :)

Although the server for the website seems to be having trouble at the mo.

Qube
Thanks for the offer - I see how things go and probably return to this thread for mirror hosts.

Servage are rubbish. They might as well promise unlimited bandwidth, because you're never going to get anywhere close to what they promise anyway. In reality the site is so slow that you couldn't use more than a few gigs of bandwidth per month even if you had millions of visitors.

Don't get me wrong, there are good cheap hosts. Servage just aren't one of them. And forget 6 Euros', they're so desperate they'll give it you for about 3 or 4. They email me about once a month offering some special offer to get me to come back. Not that I ever hosted a real site there in the first place, just a small thing ( that they couldn't do properly anyway. )

Powweb offer 3000GB bandwidth a month but I've noticed that downloading from my site is slow. The max I, or anyone I've asked to visit the site to download from, has ever gotten downlaod speed wise is between 30 - 60kb.

I noticed other sites hosted with other providers with similar bandwidth allowances per month and their downloads max out my connection.

I don't know why Powweb are slow in this regard.

Basically, it doesn't matter how much bandwidth per month you get offered. It's wether the downloads will be fast enough so you use it up.

Put your demo on a P2P and point to a P2P network that hosts game demos, not pirate P2Ps.

http://www.p2pforums.com/