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[zacaj]

My website's year of hosting just ran out, and i was debating renewing it, or finding a new host.  My current host gives me 1125000MB of space and 7500000MB of bandwidth a month.  In a best case scenario, say, I was to make a 1-2GB game that sold fairly well(I wont, but just in case ), do you think that would be enough?  Should I switch to a host with supposedly "unlimited" bandwidth?  Oh, currently Im using about 35GB a month.

[Christian Knudsen]

Just do the math. If your game is 1-2 GB and you have 7500 GB bandwith each month, your customers can download your game 7500-3750 times (not counting bandwith used for normal page views, which will probably be minimal). Do you think you'll be able to sell that many copies of your game each month? No offense, but I doubt it.

[Skofo]

Why not just host your game on FileFront if it's that big?

[weasello]

I currently use NearlyFreeSpeech.net, they only charge you for the amount of bandwidth you actually use. It's nice, especially if you have lots of failures or flops

But it can totally handle if if you have success too. You are simply billed accordingly, instead of charging you overages and/or you paying more than you have to.

[Skofo]

But it can totally handle if if you have success too.

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET can, but your wallet probably can't.

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is cheap for small things, but hella expensive for big things. Just hosting his 2GB game would cost him $20 per month, without taking bandwidth charges into account.

However, hosting the game on FileFront and the site on NFSN is probably a good idea.

[bateleur]

The other thing you could do is host the game on some service like Amazon S3 and the web pages on some cheap (free?) location because they won't take much bandwidth. The advantage of doing this is that your costs are virtually zero unless people are downloading a big game you've written, in which case they scale linearly with the copies downloaded so it still won't cost much unless a huuuge number of copies get downloaded and the download is big.

[gambrinous]

This is like making up a problem to worry about. When you finish your game and get great coverage and loads of downloads so the bandwidth actually becomes a problem, THEN have a look at changing hosts.

[Perrin]

This is like making up a problem to worry about. When you finish your game and get great coverage and loads of downloads so the bandwidth actually becomes a problem, THEN have a look at changing hosts.

I agree with this!

However bandwidth limits from hosts are kind of irrelevant because typically you'll hit their fair usage limit on CPU for the machine before you hit the bandwidth limit.

I had a near unlimited bandwidth deal from HostGator but last year white chamber got linked on some popular Chinese forums and I did like half a million download (at 400mb) over a few months and the hosting company didn't mind the bandwidth but all that traffic was killing the CPU on the machine so I had to take the file down and move it on to filefront.