Filekicker, Fileburst

[AnotherDev]

I'm looking for an host for my downloads.
Anyone can recommand Filekicker or Fileburst?
So far both look good with quite different pricing schemes


10 GB
Fileburst: $10
Filekicker: $14.95

16 GB
Fileburst: $16
Filekicker: $14.95

50 GB
Fileburst: $50
Filekicker: $29.95

Unfortunately I still don't know how many dowloads I'll get so I may try Fileburst first (since it offers the best price for 14.4 GB or less)

Is there any other player for this kind of service ?

[AnotherDev]

Just found this other one
http://www.swmirror.com/services.asp

Looks good too and like the "domain" feature.

[Valen]

There's also http://getafile.com/ which is a bit on the expensive side with $2/gig. The black background probably doesn't help their sales either. :)

[DangerCode]

Unfortunately I still don't know how many dowloads I'll get ...

What's the size of your app?

[AnotherDev]

What's the size of your app?
Around 7MB

[BantamCityGames]

I went for FileBurst for one main reason:

If this is your first game, like it was mine, you don't know how successful or unsuccessful your game will be and lets be honest, most indie's first games aren't very. So the worst overhead you will end up with if your game flops is $5 a month. And if your game is a phenominal success with 100,000 downloads in the first month, then FileBurst simply charges you for what you used and your customers never notice a lack of service. Now if you are using over 15GB every single month, then it might be wise to look at some other companies to save money, but I've yet to reach that level yet ;).

[FlySim]

Why not go with a web hosting company.

The one I use, Dreamhost, has this deal.
800 MB Disk, 40 GB Transfer
for $7.95

Or is there more to FileBurst/Filekicker that I dont understand.

Regards,
J.R.
www.flysim.com

[simonh]

FileBurst just allows you to be safe in the knowledge that if your site gets a serious amount of traffic in a short space of time, you will be able to cope with it. That 40GB of transfer that you get with your regular host can then be reserved for just html and nothing else.

I use it for Super Hamster Ball, although it hasn't really been worth it yet, as I've only had 500Mb of downloads. I may as well have used FileDribble :)

[AnotherDev]

Why not go with a web hosting company.

The one I use, Dreamhost, has this deal.
800 MB Disk, 40 GB Transfer
for $7.95

Or is there more to FileBurst/Filekicker that I dont understand.

Regards,
J.R.
www.flysim.com

It's funny because, weirdly enough, I didn't check the prices for regular hosts.
I have a free account on 1and1.com that I still haven't used. It was free for 3 years so I registered an alternate domain as a backup solution. I just checked their upgrade plans and they offer one with 50GB of bandwidth for $9.99. Seems good to me.

Anyone has some experiences with 1and1?
So far it looks great and it has one the best control panel I have ever seen.

[simonh]

I wouldn't recommend 1&1. I went with them for a bit but their customer service is pretty poor.

www.lunarpages.com are my current host - absolutely first class service, can't fault them. Damn cheap too.

[AnotherDev]

I wouldn't recommend 1&1. I went with them for a bit but their customer service is pretty poor.

www.lunarpages.com are my current host - absolutely first class service, can't fault them. Damn cheap too.

To be honest I don't really care about customer support since in 3 years with my current host I haven't needed to contact them yet (and they've known to have no customer support).

I'll still check the site you mentionned though. Thanks

Edit:
I care about uptime though. I have read that 1and1 had some promblems with that in the past. On the other hand the guarantee 99.9% uptime.

[DFG]

The cool thing about Filekicker is you can block access from certain countries and help protect your bandwidth. I guess you could do this via .htaccess with a regular host, but I like Filekicker's reporting to isolate where the bandwidth drain is coming from.

[EpicBoy]

Out of curosity, when does that come in handy? When would you want to block a specific country from downloading your demo?

[DFG]

If you are able to tell which countries you are getting sales from, you can block out countries that have lots of downloads and little or no sales.

[jaymenna78734]

If you are looking for very large (300 GB+) file servers...


http://www.purestatic.com

[Tertsi]

This hoster seems to have one of the best prices on the market if not the best but I can't seem to find a review about them. http://www.hasweb.com/experience/hasweb_hostingplans.html
I'm most interested in this one so does anyone have any experience with these guys?

This one has nice prices too but the unlimited bandwidth thing isn't always reliable due to their terms of service which states that they can delete your account anytime (so if you used a lot of resources they might just do that). :( They still have a very satisfied customer base it seems so I don't know if they would ever delete your account for just using a big load of resources. http://www.midphase.com/

Here's an useful link too: http://www.web-hosting-reviews.org/

[tonyedgecombe]

Out of curosity, when does that come in handy? When would you want to block a specific country from downloading your demo?

When you get cracked and all your bandwidth is being sucked into China where it is extremely unlikely you will get any sales.

[otaku]

I use ReadyHosting.com for my web sites. They offer 500MB storage and have "unlimited" bandwidth for $100/yr, but if you have more than one site you get to be a "reseller" and all subsequent sites are $50/yr. "Unlimited" is defined as "don't piss them off." You also get unlimited e-mail accounts with 500MB of storage, web & POP3.

How good have they been? Very good. I would give them 4.5 out of 5 stars. I'll take off half a star for their decrepit customer support web site that requires you to log in to different parts of the system. They are fixing this and it now all integrates through a central control panel but there are still parts that require individual login. They have also suffered some e-mail system issues at the beginning of the year when one of their servers, that I happen to have my personal homepage on, was the victim of a DOS attack which meant that e-mail transfer was slow for a couple of days. Their customer support is very responsive and helpful.

My personal web site has about 3GB per month average transfer, when I get slashdotted this spikes to about 15GB+ per month. I also have two music web sites, one a database that has about 2GB/month and a single musician site that hosts some MP3s that transfers around 4GB/month. I am also about to launch our company website for our "indie game developer" on there (actually, the site is already there, there's just nothing to see right now). I also have my room-mate's personal home page hosted there, and also an ice hockey team web site.

The only downside is their standard policy of not hosting raw .EXE files due to concerns over worms & trojans. They will host Mac binaries, .ZIP, .RAR, etc. By special arrangement they allow you to host .EXE files if you contact customer support and have them unlock that feature. Their major policy is that you cannot be a "download only" site. i.e. you have to have content, e.g. a band site, a legitimate software company, etc.

You can get password protected directories, custom 404 pages, and again, special request will give you access to your raw log files rather than the "web trends" stats page they normally provide.

[jaymenna78734]

Most hosts provide you x Gigs in file transfer. Very few of them actually guarantee the capacity to handle the loads your games will take up.

Look at it this way. Most of the time your web server is plodding along with a few thousand hits a day. Every 10 minutes you get a download.

This is all nice if you are getting one or two at a time. But you have to keep in mind that it can only be served up as fast as machine that is doing the hosting will allow it. (or perhaps the routers/switches the traffic is flowing thru). What else is it serving? Is it chewing on some unknown not so well written PHP code?

What happens if you have a few thousand users and you announce version 2.0? Gridlock. If you have done the PR thing properly lots of new users will also pile on. The machine bogs down. People get slow files or 504s. They go elsewhere. You loose money.

The smartest thing to do use your host for your web site. (Hey the HTML page is what 15k?) But use a file serving host for the downloads. Just link them directly from your page to the file host. Most of these services are pay for what you use and they don't have all sort of other stuff running using up capacity (no PHP .net .asp mail servers etc)

One thing to beware of. Some of the hosts out there offer "Speed tests". This is silly. Anybody can serve a single file up fast. Unless you happen to have a few hundred PCs, this kind of test is meaningless.

Now for the shameless plug: http://www.purestatic.com. We host some really monster stuff. But: you can probably afford us.