That took days ... but free downloads ends in flames, again.

[Trotski]

 

 

Har har har !!! but you know I make a beautiful breakfast mate

6 hours ago, Nightshade/PR said:

And just when I thought it was safe to be one of those bloody unwashed colonial heathens...... There'll be no living with him now. 

 

 

[AcariaPlainum]

11 hours ago, Erik said:

Ask an intelligent question and I might feel compelled to answer. I have no idea what you mean by "hosting arrangements". We are a not a guest in someone's house we own the house from top to bottom, soup to nuts. 

Well honestly if that paywall stays then delete any mods i uploaded here

If you dont even want to be transparent about if you locally host or rent, if your local what setup are you running im talking hardware or even a cluster? What provider are you using if your renting?

How much storage is on the website total and how much do the mods take up? How many users total and how much bandwidth is used up on average and peak?

What about your reverse proxy setup? Also if your locally hosting what ISP plan and provider etc etc

Id be curious what your current setup costs and maybe if we can optimize 

 

[+Erik]

5 hours ago, AcariaPlainum said:

Well honestly if that paywall stays then delete any mods i uploaded here

If you dont even want to be transparent about if you locally host or rent, if your local what setup are you running im talking hardware or even a cluster? What provider are you using if your renting?

How much storage is on the website total and how much do the mods take up? How many users total and how much bandwidth is used up on average and peak?

What about your reverse proxy setup? Also if your locally hosting what ISP plan and provider etc etc

Id be curious what your current setup costs and maybe if we can optimize 

 

The two mods you uploaded, thank you I'll get those removed right away.

I have been more transparent about this topic, more than anyone I know, that statement alone is offensive. I have churned through countless posts in the past and disclosed our situation many times, your questions are not new. Our current port 80 accessible files reside on just over 2G of physical space, db and system files currently hovering around 1G. We are housed in a Class I data center in North America that sits on global fiber giving us access to push 1 gigabyte of data every second. We are a clustered running on Linux supported metal and current AMP distributions depending on the machine. Our MDU consists of Tier I and Tier II backbones so we don't use a provider we use many at the same time based on traffic peering and routes. Our bandwidth monthly aggregate average is 2.3 to 2.4 TB, peaks are 5TB and higher. The quick math is that's 1000GB = 1TB. Spikes and use don't translate very well into useful information. What about a reverse proxy setup? That's the most out of left field question ever. A reverse proxy would conceal our machines behind a network layer so they become invisible. That layer would destroy throughput and normal access to the site by users and is the absolute opposite of what we'd want. As I mentioned earlier you are not connecting to a Slackware box sitting in my basement. We have a fully established network of gear sitting on the edge of some of the world's most powerful ports directly connected to the global internet. Our cost's consist of three primary vectors when it relates to what we do. 1. Cabinet Space: we rent space in a hardware cabinet that is the physical space where our servers reside, they are sold in 1U units and we occupy 4 of them. 2. Bandwidth: we don't have a "plan" like a home user. We buy our bandwidth by the GB bucket which again doesn't relate well to use or throughput, it's a total aggregate of overhead, inbound, and outbound traffic. 3. Administrative Costs: This would include everything from software licensing fees, domain related fees, taxes and accounting, IP related fees, insurance, and the list goes on. What does it cost to run this place? Our base cost to sit idle is $30 per day add connectivity $40-$45 per day and those are averaged days, we often spike way above those numbers with daily costs getting into the $70 range. What are you going to optimize? Put this same setup on the cloud and you're looking at doubling our costs. On the cloud bandwidth is cheap but the disk space costs are not. Things are not getting cheaper anywhere, especially here America. We aren't buying a Telstra Unlimited Data Plan for $129 AUD per month mate, I hope that's apparent. This was a time sink, and it likely won't happen again. Be well.

[OlWilly]

So you're saying that as soon as you established free access, people immediately started getting their way to download more stuff... in amounts unacceptable for your hosting capabilities. Also "bandwidth monthly aggregate average is 2.3 to 2.4 TB, peaks are 5TB and higher", really? 

This means that a lot of people are still interested in the game which is actually surprising. Does ThirdWire knows about this? The writing on the wall is that they really should make SF3, all of this shows that it will sell well 

[+Erik]

Ive reached out multiple times with no answer. I will also add our traffic is skewed really heavily with Europe, South America, and Africa being primary aggressors, the US is in the mix with China and Malaysia right behind them.

[compufat]

I could suggest giving you a free subscription of one file download per day only for users who have been connected to CA for more than 2 consecutive years, I have been a member of this community since 2010 but I lost contact and returned in 2019 and since then I continue to offer a little of myself to CA, I am not asking for anything irrational, it is just that I cannot pay for my subscription in foreign currency, it is impossible for me, and even if I cannot download, I will continue in Combatace because I love SF2, and I like to see the great work of the moderators and designers of this wonderful community, I hope that one day I can download their work again. Thank you

[mue]

12 hours ago, Erik said:

On the cloud bandwidth is cheap but the disk space costs are not.

How much disk space is required?

[+Erik]

Mue I really don't have time for this right now. It's over a $1000 a month to host high availability live data like ours. I research it every month in hopes the prices come down. It's not like using cloud storage like you'd buy for one-drive or from amazon, those prices are dirt cheap because it's low access content.

[simonmiller416]

18 hours ago, compufat said:

I have been a member of this community since 2010 but I lost contact and returned in 2019 and since then I continue to offer a little of myself to CA, I am not asking for anything irrational, it is just that I cannot pay for my subscription in foreign currency, it is impossible for me, and even if I cannot download, I will continue in Combatace because I love SF2

This is almost exactly my situation right now, exactly like you.

Of course, for now, it does not affect my continued creation of mods and uploading,it is okay I love SF2.

 

In the other hand...I found out I became an E-6...

Edited 15 hours ago by simonmiller416

[+Erik]

15 minutes ago, simonmiller416 said:

In the other hand...I found out I became an E-6...

Place holders while I implement some of this.

[+Erik]

New program implemented. FREE Memberships are now automatic and provide 1 file per day. If the system isn't abused we can discuss increasing the number of downloads the membership provides. 

The FREE Membership is now automatic and it's issued when you meet these guidelines.

1. Your account is 30 days or older.
2. Your account has made a post in the forums in the last 45 days.

If you meet these two requirements NEW accounts AKA the now AIRMAN BASIC accounts will promote to AIRMAN accounts and provide the FREE Membership automatically. Existing members, if you make a post in the forums your account will upgrade automatically.

Why is a post in the forums needed, so we can add more details to your account profile. Those details can be matched against other accounts, even those with no posts, and we'll go back to quietly suspending accounts that abuse the system by creating duplicate accounts. The 30 day delay is the pause built in to stop people from creating multi accounts. If this works we can expand on the idea.

Paid memberships will function independently and exclusively as they always have.