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[Craig Stern]

Does anybody here know of a good competing site that I can go with instead of Fileplanet for hosting a demo? So far I've found FileFront.com, which lets you upload your game demo for free. Anyone know of any others?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

why not use your own site? personally it gives a bad impression to me when a game's site tells you to dl the game from some third-party site

that said there are tons, willhostforfood is often used for indie games and is run by an online friend of mine who i met on the game maker forums, there's also the venerable old download.com

[Craig Stern]

Hi Paul, thanks for the suggestions. There are two reasons why I want a third party host:

1) stat tracking
2) bandwidth

I don't currently have the capability to track numbers of downloads for a particular file on my website, whereas I know some of these other sites (like Fileplanet and Filefront) do this automatically. I want to be able to see at a glance how many downloads the demo has received so I can determine what the game's downloads-to-sales ratio is.

Also, in case something great happens and the demo becomes very popular, I don't want it having an impact on how my site runs.

WillHostForFood looks a bit like RapidShare, in that it lets you quickly post a file, but without features like stat tracking. (WHFF also has a 10 MB size limit, which isn't going to work in this instance--my game has a lot of high quality music and sound effects that increase its size a fair bit beyond 10 MB.)

Download.com is a good idea--maybe Tucows also, if that's still around. I'll look into those.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

if your host doesn't track access of individual files (some do, some don't) in its stats automatically you can still track downloads pretty easily using javascript; i use google analytics, which has some code to insert into a link which counts downloads.

willhostforfood allows 100mb if you register if i recall; registration is free, and it does track downloads (example: http://willhostforfood.com/?Action=download&fileid=80340) -- you can also link directly to the file and not have to tell people to go to the site and see the ads, which you can't do with rapidshare

[grapefrukt]

another option would be bittorrent. i'd prefer a torrent rather than crappy free host like rapidshare. maybe something like http://www.legaltorrents.com/

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

torrents are pretty slow when you don't have that many people seeding them, though -- and since the developer can't promise to seed it 24/7 i'm not sure it's a wise choice for indie games.

also, a lot of users don't have torrent programs and wouldn't want to have to download one just to download a program; it might work for hardcore games where the audience can be expected to be techies and know all about it, but wouldn't really work for a more general audience

[Craig Stern]

willhostforfood allows 100mb if you register if i recall; registration is free, and it does track downloads (example: http://willhostforfood.com/?Action=download&fileid=80340) -- you can also link directly to the file and not have to tell people to go to the site and see the ads, which you can't do with rapidshare

Ah, good to know. Maybe I'll use them then.

[alspal]

Dropbox is awesome and free. It lets you hotlink to files as well.
You can have it as a folder on your computer too, and you can also set up a folder to be shared with someone else which is good when collaborating.

[Christian Knudsen]

Seconding the willhostforfood.com recommendation. The fact that you can link directly to the file and not force your visitors to look at ads/wait for a countdown is a big plus in my book.

is run by an online friend of mine who i met on the game maker forums

Can you ask your friend how he's making any money off of it? I love the service, but I can't figure out how it's a commercially viable endeavour. Maybe it's just building up a userbase with the prospect of making money later?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i could ask, but hosting is very cheap if you don't mind shared servers and less than optimal speed sometimes -- i believe he uses 1and1.com, which offers "unlimited" bandwidth for like 3$ a month. he probably has the $7 a month package because i doubt the site uses less than 10gb of space (the $7 one has 150gb of space). so as long as his ads and donations make him more than $7 a month he'd break even. and even if not, $7 a month isn't that much in comparison to the benefit the site does for the indie games and game maker communities. plus he lives in a fairly upper-middle class area and often tells me about how powerful his computer specs are so i don't imagine $7 a month is setting him back much

[Christian Knudsen]

Will Host For Food can't have that many users if he can run it on a $3 a month subscription plan? I imagine bandwith usage must be very high for filesharing services and in my experience there's no such thing as "unlimited bandwith". Hosting providers always have Terms of Services that provide an indirect bandwith cap even though they advertise it as "unlimited".

Anyway, it's really cool what he's doing, it's just always puzzled me...

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

yeah, i don't think it has too many users -- probably just a few thousand files, each averaging a few hundred downloads. someone with a million downloads in a day would break his server most likely.

[Christian Knudsen]

Ah, okay. It's still a relatively small operation, then. I've seen it mentioned in a lot of places, so I just assumed that it was pretty big by now.

[Craig Stern]

Okay, I tried using WillHostForFood, but after the fourth consecutive time the upload failed, I decided to just go with FileFront.

[AuthenticKaizen]

maybe give box.net a try.
its pretty good so far and has no ads.

http://box.net/

here you can see how often a file has been downloaded


and this is how it looks like when someone wants to download a file



ive also heard that dropbox is also pretty good
http://www.getdropbox.com/

[Noyb]

Filefront has been pretty terrible for me when I used them to host Macarena of the Missing. I've had issues with European users not being able to download, and Filefront deleting my files without warning if I haven't logged in for a week or two. Granted, I'm not a high-volume user (30 mb freeware game, around 200-300 downloads mostly localized within the month TIGS compo), but Will Host for Food has never given me any such trouble.

[Craig Stern]

Ugh--I just tried WillHostForFood again, thinking maybe they were having a bad day last time. About 10 minutes into the upload, the server reset the connection. Never again!