that's to bad , i would donate, but i don't have pay-pal or a credit card. i would help seed but i had already downloaded all the 200+ MB games/apps that i wanted to. Sorry that i can't help very much, maybe you could put some adds on certain pages, i am sure that if you asked people to click those adds to help support the site, they would do it. (I would click on them if it would help support the site)

If necessary I can disable downloading games above a certain size. Uploading will still be possible ... not sure if that would help though. What would help is if we could find someone who knows PHP to write a module or extension that requires CAPTCHAs for downloading, as well as (possible) caps.
@Maedi: Can you email me a breakdown of traffic day-by-day?

I just did a little research and we have 545 registered users. Apparently that number shot up when we started requiring registrations.

From looking at the size of the site (about 40 GB) compared to the bandwidth being used, it seems that using BitTorrent, with enforced RULES, would work. (There would be a way to get a file if no one is seeding, as well.) But we can't do this with S3, unfortunately.

Maedi: can you think about this and let me know what a good solution would be? Probably ~160 GB of server space would be more than enough at this moment, and ~100 would be fine for a while.

If we moved to a different server we could still use S3 for backups; just lock out people from downloading from S3 and have a script push files to S3 as they come in.

IIGS_User's suggestion sounds good. Archive the bigger files and make time for develope a lasting solution for complete access.

All right. I'll wait for input from Maedi before implementing anything like that, though.

200MB+ files only by request, and perhaps requiring a $1 donation, even though PayPal would take a chunk of this, it's £0.20 in the UK, not sure about where you're based.

Is that viable ? Does the residue (after PayPal take their slice) more than cover the cost of the bandwidth consumed to download a 400MB file (say). I'm skint, but I'd find $5 to download my 5 favourite CD-ROM sized classics, if I didn't own them already.

We'll probably find a solution sooner rather than later. Moving servers (while retaining S3 for backup) is likely the way to go for the long run.

I like bertyboys proposal. And why not giving out "tokens" for donating to the site? Those tokens could be used for downloading the bigger files ?

Another option would be that everyone needs to register and donate some money (from 5$ - ? and only then gets the permission to download files over like 2 MB at all.

bertyboys idea is a good one, but don't forget about the people who don't have pay-pal or credit cards

I'm still waiting for a reply from Maedi; I might just end up putting limits in place myself. 2MB is not practical though.

Also, PLEASE SEED TORRENTS!!!

Excuse my Technical English limitations, but what exactly do you mean by "seed torrents"?
(I know what a torrent is, and download using them)
but iI don't know the "seed" part.

what exactly do you mean by "seed torrents"?

To make the file available to download from your computer. You seed by keeping the BitTorrent client connected to the web once the download is completed for you.

The idea behind BitTorrent is that once someone finish downloading a big file from MacGarden, he will seed and other people who want to download the same file will then be downloading from your computer alongside the MacGarden server, saving them bandwidth and money. Once those other people finish downloading, they will seed and the bandwidth is shared among all.

The problem is that until there are many seeders for a single file, seeding takes a toll on your connection, and nobody wants to be first. And there are people who don't care and don't seed. These are called leechers, and the web is full of them.

The most common anti-leeching method, which Balrog wants to implement, is to require people to seed before they can download any other thing. The minimum ratio is 1:1, which means that if it took you three hours to download a file then you must seed for three (non-consecutive) hours before you can download again.

But that sort of things only work with a big user base. MacGarden has a small user base (545 registered users so far) and that means they'll be forced to impose a bigger ratio of 1:2 at least--that is, two hours seeding for every hour you spent downloading--and I repeat: at least. Who knows how big the ratio must be to cut down the bandwidth cost.

545 registered users is not that small. It's been growing steadily too. Right now the number is 679 users. Growth per day comes to about 90. That's a lot.

Juat 1 question:

Should we be promoting / highlighting the site on other sites and blogs we're extremely active with, ie. Apple Discussions, MacRumors, etc ?? I'd normally say yes, but I couldn't guarantee that all the visitors from there wouldn't just leech everything during this period of unsustainable bandwidth costs.

Alright, been a leecher myself for years without knowing ... anyway, thanks for the explaination, I'll continue to seed my downloads in the future.

@Euryale: Try using uTorrent for torrents. It's probably one of the best torrent apps for Windows.

@bertyboy: Not quite yet ... Though places like 68kmla are OK.

I apologize if I missed a few comments, as this thread is getting long, and I joined after it started, but I had a thought in regards to torrents. I personally don't mind seeding well after completing a download. But, I don't want to leave my computer on to seed when I'm not around. Could Macintosh Garden designate certain times or days that torrent access would be available? Of course, this is assuming that torrents would be used for files larger than "x" MB.

The reason I suggest this is since the user base is relatively small, would it not make sense to concentrate all the "business" to certain times? That way seeders would know when the greatest potential for uploading would occur. I've been seeding a couple torrents for more than 50 hours each (not constant), and I have not uploaded a single KB.

@InkBlot: The problem is that we don't have control over S3 seeding. If we had our own server, we could control such things; should happen soon though.

I am interested in helping out with this problem.
I have experience with setting up and managing running public facing servers.

S3's service is very high quality, but also rather expensive.
12cents/gigabyte is rather ridiculous, which becomes $122.88 per Terabyte.

For comparison, a VPS can give you $2.50TB which is several magnitudes cheaper.
You can also get a cheap dedicated server for $50-$100/month, with bandwidth in similar price range.
True, the service quality won't be nearly as good as S3 but honestly, this service doesn't need to be that reliable.

Questions
1)What is the average monthly bandwidth consumption right now?
2)How big is the collection at this point?

I would recommend you immediately enable the free cloudflare CDN caching on all links hosted on macintoshgarden.org.
This will not only speed up downloads but it should also greatly reduce bandwidth consumed (and therefore save $$), at least for popular files.

Their filesize limit is 512MB, which should be fine for this site.

All that is required is a dns change and this should significantly help right away.

Options
Below, I'm providing some generalized suggestions on options.
I'm assuming the activity is fairly small because this is a niche site.
If the traffic is much higher then I'm guessing, then something more sophisticated might be required...

1)Move anything of significant size to one of the various file sharing sites out there.

This will reduce the load on the main site, but it does become more inconvenient for end users and maintenance will always be a problem as the download sites die off, the links will need to get replaced with the new ones.

If you are going this path, i would recommend using a tool like MirrorCreator which will upload your file to several sharing sites at once. This way, you can easily spread out the risk across a number of places, by easily adding half a dozen or so different links.

This will still require maintenance to make sure the links are still active, but at least there isn't a single point of failure.

2)Depending on the load and the amount of data we are talking about, going for a much cheaper unmanaged hosting solution would be the way to go (at least for file storage).

This would reduce the amount of maintenance required by the community for the links and provide a more consistent experience for the community.

I would recommend keeping the DB and main site on AWS.
That part is traditionally complicated to move and it's reliability is more important then the file download capability, IMHO.

If the load and data is relatively small <40MB/sec (and especially if it's very small <10MB/sec ), then getting a 2-3 of Storage VPS's to host the data would be adequate.

It would be much cheaper (~$10/month each) and will allow the collection to grow.

The risk with VPS's is if they get too much activity, they can get shut down by the hosts (which is why I would split the load across several units, plus the CDN).

A Dedicated server are better if the load is heavier (but not too heavy <100mb), because nobody can complain about the usage but the cost will be higher upfront and it can be a single point of failure.

3)If the activity of the site really is that heavy (>100mbs), then things can become more complicated.

For a moment a was "scared" ´cuz I thought there were money problems again and thought the site was goin´down when I read the very first comment (from Maedi).
but then... I noticed the date.

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Love the Picard face-palm. One of my faves, and excellent as ascii art.

I would definitely go $2.50/TB against $122.88

WOAH! A decent saving there

PS. I would be keen on setting myself up as a permanent seeder for torrents (up to about 200GB max.) My iMac is on 24/7/365. If we could find another 5 or more other MG users willing to do the same, torrenting large files could become a reality.

If they are reinstated i'd do the same, i have plenty of bandwith spare atm

I can seed, I've seeded like 2TB of wii games lol