I am not yet to a point where I can actually put up some pages and let people download my shareware, but I am to the point where I am starting to look at various hosting providers and I wonder if there are any magic formulae for calculating projected bandwidth usage?

I mean, at first glance it seems like it would be:

required_bandwidth = projected_downloads/month * download_size

But what about fudge-factors like incomplete downloads and such?

Is it really that simple?

-daniel

required_bandwidth = projected_downloads/month * download_size

I think its a very good start.

I would probably add a few 100K per download for player spending time on your various web pages. If you let the player create a profile at your site, allow him to post photo, high scores, levels, keep tabs on other players, a forum etc that could hog a lot of bandwidth too. Maybe 2Gb a month (apparently this forum eats 2Gb a month).

Originally posted by jaggu
(apparently this forum eats 2Gb a month)

And increasing rapidly... this month these forums will use about 3GB. There are a lot of lurkers here.

Regarding file downloads, just about any host should offer enough bandwidth to handle your game until you build up traffic. 15-30GB per month is fairly common for a modest hosting package. And you can always offload the file downloads to a dedicated file hosting service like fileburst.com or getafile.com.

You also might want to look at swmirror (http://www.swmirror.com). They are another dedicated file hosting service, like fileburst or getafile, but with a different pricing structure.

They charge 20$ for every 50 gigs transferred. The savings over fileburst would only happen if you transferred more than 20 gigs/month- which most shareware companies do. If you have shared hosting, they are probably the way to go.

Personally, I would highly recommend getting a dedicated server and not using shared hosting for your site. Being on a server with 100 other sites is just asking for trouble.

-Mike

(asked before in another thread)
anybody uses their e-commerce service for hosting their demo?

It would probably be okay as long as you redirect from your site. You don't want to dangling have links out there in case you switch providers. Also, a redirect will allow you to log statistics for downloads.

Also, how reliable are their downloads?

What dedicated server company do you use ?

Do you have a limit of transfer on a dedicated server ?

Thank you
pat.

I've been using swmirror and they've been really great. I especially like the statistics they provide. You can get stats on referral sites, countries downloading your game, projections, and much more. It'll graph out the data in many different ways. I haven't used many of the others out there, but I've been very impressed with swmirror.

This may be a dumb question, but I've been afraid to re-direct from my site because most of the download sites require you to link directly to your exe. So, if I want to change providers I'm SOL. Is there a way to do it safely?

Jeff Evertt
www.evertt.com

I think that the sites you've mentioned are against links that point to HTML pages with <META http-equiv="refresh">. This is the usual case with links you can get from Download.com, SimTel, WinSite, TuCows, etc.

When you redirect to the actual file the process is invisible for users. Their browser just downloads the file. There are no pages bloated with advertisements when you do this and the users are happy :)

What do other people think about that?

Sorry for the late reply, I am a daddy now! :D

Anyway, you can easily redirect a binary file on a server by using .htaccess.

SWMirror, Fileburst, and getafile all let you link directly to the file.

As for dedicated hosting, I have 2 cobalt raq4i servers at rackshack.net. They are HUGE, housing 10,000 servers. It is unmanaged hosting though, meaning you have to monitor the server yourself. I just set up some automated stuff to keep an eye on my servers. They are very responsive to trouble tickets too. Rackshack has several gigabit pipes to the net, and my servers are never down :) Cobalt raqs are known for super reliability and ease of use.

If I didn't like the cobalt raqs so much, I would probably use someone like rackspace, dialtone, or nocster(burst.net). The general consensus now is that nocster.net is the place to host dedicated servers- similar service and uptime as the rest, but MUCH less expensive. They are fully managed, so someone is watching your server 24/7.

Any way you look at it, a good hosting provider is not something you want to gamble on!

Hope that helps,
Mike

Congratulations, Mike. :)

Congrats, Mike! Today is actually my daughter's 3rd birthday (wow how time flies), and our second child is due in August. They should make good game testers in a few years. :)

Thanks guys! :D

These first couple of days are crazy!