I doubt this is the best place to post this, but its probably something that people here have had to deal with.


So you put your demo on your site for download.


Then you realise that with all those links on the internet pointing to it, you're going to run out of bandwidth pretty darn fast.


So you open an account with a file hosting service such as getafile, fileburst, etc.


Now, because all those links out on the web point to your original file location on your website, you create a .htaccess file to redirect the requests to the new location. ie, redirect /file.exe http://dax.fileburst.com/file.exe


Then you try downloading one of the files using the old file link to make sure the redirect is working correctly, and find that getright won't accept the redirection and instead just disconnects from the server.


Then you sigh and think to yourself "how the heck am I going to fix this?"




The .htaccess redirects work perfectly when you just download from explorer, but Getright (and I assume other download managers) won't accept them. Is there a solution to this?

I'm resurrecting this stillborn thread because I still want the answer to Dax's question. :D

If you set up file redirects on your server, are download accelerators still a problem?

Also, another question. Aren't file redirects in general looked down upon? I've been submitting a lot in the past week and quite a number of shareware sites explicitly say you must link directly to a file and no redirects. Am I being too literal? Sometimes I think they're only cautious about download wait pages ("Your download should begin in a moment, if it doesn't click here").

At this point I'm just trying to get my game out there, but soon I'm going to get into tracking. I'm not certain how to track downloads to purchases without slipping a cookie in there just before the download ala redirect. Either that or make special builds for each site. (Yuck, mercy me.)

Just about everyone redirects... The download managers handle it fine now. I tested all the major ones. So I wouldn't even give it a second thought, despite what a download site may tell you.

That's great news. Thanks for the info, Mike!

I don't do a direct redirect (using .htaccess) but instead use a php script to push the file and add a cookie for tracking. The result is almost identical to a normal file query, except for the cookie. Seems to work nicely.

Edit: I forgot my point.. :) The point was that my download file doesn't really reside canonically where the URL points, but somewhere else on the server.

Originally posted by elund
At this point I'm just trying to get my game out there, but soon I'm going to get into tracking. I'm not certain how to track downloads to purchases without slipping a cookie in there just before the download ala redirect. Either that or make special builds for each site. (Yuck, mercy me.)

FileKicker has cookie based tracking built-in if you use one of our e-commerce partners. Unforunately the tracking rates with cookies is pretty low, about 15% of sales. It is a great way to get hints about where your sales are comming from but not good enough to do ROI calculations.

Have a look at an article I wrote about using another FileKicker feature to track downloads to sales:

http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/article17.html

The tracking rates with this method are about 80% after you have put tracking codes in place. It is consistent enough that when the percentage of tracked sales falls, you know that you have a new, unknown source of sales out there.

Let me give you an example. One of our developers was using this tracking method and was getting a consistent 80% tracking rate for about 2-3 months. One day he walks in an finds his tracking rate has dropped to 73%. This starts him hunting around in his sales stats, cookie tracking, and talking to a couple of customers. Eventually he notices that 17% of his sales are comming from the Netherlands, it turns out that his program had been picked up by a magazine there. That was a nice boost in sales, but nothing further came of it. In many cases developers are able to take this information and use it to buy additional exposure on these sites, or to form partnerships.

And the nice thing is that there isn't any additional setup to add a new tracking code (other than writing it down on a piece of paper so you don't forget it). Much easier than managing 100's of custom builds.