Thanks to everyone for your great overwhelming response to my free stuff.

However ALL of it has been available for quite sometime, but when I changed servers from a Windows Machine to a Unix machine I had to update the links and as a result of this everything appeared in the "what's new" section.

The unfortunate result of this is that my site bandwidth has gone through the celing:- as of 05:12 AEST today here are the usage figures since I changed the links:-

22/9 31808 hits 2952328 kbs 11.64% of total usage for month
23/9 89977 hits 8572191 kbs 33.81% of total usage for month
24/9 86487 hits 7519391 kbs 29.65% of total usage for month
25/9 49323 hits 4254451 kbs 16.78% of total usage for month
26/9 7675 hits 716758 Kbs 2.83% of total usage for month

Total kbs: 104015019kb or about 10 Gigabytes

In the same period only about 50 people actually visited the site .... so most of the traffic was files downloaded through R'osity's links.

As I said I am overwhelmed and honored by the response but even after deleting some of the most popular downloads yesterday, it didn't make a huge impact on bandwith, as a result I have had to delete all downloads as at $10 per extra gig usage, I doubt my wallet could stand it until the end of the month, as the last 4 days have already cost me $50.

I regret having to do this but economics are economics, I am a great beliver in free stuff so the good news is that I will slowly re-release my free stuff starting next month, but this time I will stagger their release so as I don't have a re-occurrence of this episode.

I appologize to any one who has missed out this time around and ask that you hang in there - my free stuff will be back all be it slowly.

Once again thanks for your response.

On a closing note is there something that R'osity programmers could do to avoid older downloads reappearing as new releases when the link is updated?

Attached Link: http://www.lavers-place.com

Hey Tas, you could put 're-release' or something on the thumb so people would think to check the notes and requirements (where you could add that they are the same items, just new links). That might save you some bandwidth when you do finally get back to uploading :)

Having just about finished going through the exercise it is starting to drop off now , however it is 34GB and it has only been 10 days... Thankfully my bandwidth limit is now 50GB/Month.

It's sad to admit many of us can't afford or don't want to spend the money to give away free stuff. Yes, the web site hosts are in it for the money. One host told me he made more profit from folks who just put up a personal site as a hobby, and had very little traffic. I'm willing to bet many artists finally abandoned freebies, and "went commercial" partially because of the high cost of giving away freebies.

$10 per GIG for overages? Holy moly! I wasn't even paying that much in 1997! The highest I've ever paid was $8 per Gb and that was in 1997. You need to search for a new host right away, they are completely ripping you off. :(

How much is your base plan of 50 Gb per month, Richard?

Message edited on: 09/26/2004 02:32

For those interested in good value hosting, try Hostonce.com - $6.95 p/m, 800Mb space and 40Gb transfer p/m. For a great package try Hostforweb.com - $9.95 p/m, 750Mb space and 50Gb transfer p/m. I use both these hosts and highly recommend them.

From HostOnce.com's TOS: RESOURCE POLICY Resources are defined as bandwidth and/or disk space and/or processor utilization. HostOnce.com allows the consumption of 800MB of disk space and a monthly bandwidth allowance of 40GB per web hosting account. In the event, where a customer is found to be exceeding these limits or monopolizing processor utilization, HostOnce.com reserves the right to impose the High Resource User Policy for the consideration of all customers. HIGH RESOURCE USER POLICY HostOnce.com may implement the following policy to its sole discretion: When a website is found to be monopolizing the resources available, hence jeopardizing server performance and resources for other customers, HostOnce.com reserves the right to suspend that site immediately*. This policy is implemented to prevent the misuse of our servers. Customers may be offered an option whereby HostOnce.com continues hosting the website for an additional fee. * Please Note: HostOnce.com Reserves the right to suspend services to any account that it find affects overall server performance for other customers hosted on the same server (this does not necessarily mean issues related only to bandwidth or diskspace consumption). This suspension is effective immediately on action by the Abuse Team and customers are reminded to read the Backups policy below regarding this. --------------- They suspend the account immediately, without billing for overages, and then "may" continue hosting the site for additional fees, but they don't seem to disclose how much they charge for overages. :( They also want $83.40 up front which rounds out to $6.95 per month.

HostForWeb.com looks much better. They clearly state their overage prices at $2.00 per Gb. Still more than I pay, but better than $10. ;)

This is why so many people have gone to "free membership required" for downloads. It slows the bandwidth use down notably, and only people who are really interested in the item(s) will bother to sign up for the site. ;-) This is also why I don't have any of my freebies listed in the Freestuff here, hehe. bonni

I'm with Affordable Host. http://www.affordablehost.com/cpanel.shtml $US19.95/month, 1GB storage, 50GB Data/Month They also have super stats (you can see if anybody is hotlinking,where your hits are comming from including IP adresses, and if individial zips are being d/l or not). Originally I joined to (almost) eliminate Spam (they have great some great Email tools) and have found the service to be excellent. If you do go over your limit they suspend your account for the month. I have never worked for them. I must admit I was not aware of HostOnce.

I have never hosted with a company that would suspend you for going over your limit. All the companies that I have hosted with bill you for overages at the end of the month.

My choice is to be disconnected, It save unpleasant suprises. I once exceeded my ISP D/L Limit and my next account was for $300 instead of $140 for the month. Nowdays the my ISP limit is 10GB and charges $65/Month. I am on Cable.

Well, I have dedicated hosting and I have 2000 Gb a month, currently, so I have never had overages since I got this plan. But I would never want to be disconnected. I suppose I can understand wanting to be disconnected if you are running a personal site, but if I was running a business site on that hosting and got shut off for overages, I would be absolutely fuming mad, irate, livid... you get the picture. LOL Your ISP charges for bandwidth? Wow. I'm on cable, too, and I have never had to pay for more bandwidth. I upload and download a massive amount of stuff monthly because I run a design company from home. Just like with hosting, I'd be livid if they shut me off or billed me extra. :(

Mine is all personal as I am now retired, I used to be a Tech/Manager with the Telco and ISP I am now with. Also In Australia you didn't get a lot of choice in residential areas when it comes to Cable Internet, although Wireless Highspeed Internet access is now becoming available. Also with the 10GB plan nowdays they may cut you back to 64KBits and have no charges if you excede the limit, They got too many complaints from people running up huge bills! Generally I use ~ 8GB/Month and that includes my son playing on line games etc!

Yikes! I was seriously interested in moving to Australia until I read that. I guess I'll wait a few years, because I like my unlimited cable internet at 3 Megabits download speed. :)

I live in Australia (Melbourne) and I have unlimited download for cable. I pay $AU65 a month for it (that's $46.3706 USD as of today's exchange rate), and generally use around 8Gb a month. On a couple months I've gone over 10Gb and they never cut my connection speed for it. My server, on the other hand, is with a different provider and it's got a completely different plan. When we got hit with a denial of service attack a couple months back (due to a worm on some random machine on the net) it went way over our bandwidth limit (which has now been seriously increased to prevent this happening in the future). Ouch. That hurt. But for home use, the unlimited plan from Telstra is pretty good. I mean, I wouldn't run a server on it, but for personal/small business use it's pretty good and quite affordable. So go ahead and move to Oz if you want. :-) bonni

It's all fine and well to say find a new host - bear in mind my over charges are in AUD$ - but I have had problems in the past dealing with overseas hosts, not to mention with the floating exchange rate, I was never sure what the next quarter's charges would be - that's why this time I went with an Aussie host - at least their responses to troubles are prompt and at the worst it is only a local phone call.

Problem seems to be with local hosting here is - you basically get what you pay for, and the features I needed for other parts of my site just weren't available on the "budget" plans.

I'm fairly sure that a lot of these people just download for the hell of it and never actually use the downloaded items.

Looking at these figures, I'm seriously considering using my extra database and re-developing the site into a Postnuke driven site with free membership.

Any other Aussies interested in displaying their art work if I go down this path? If I am going to do it that way - may as well build a decent site, as I don't really feel I could justify a free membership site based on my artwork alone...

We could call it something snappy like the "Land of Oz" or something like that - as we seem to be hiding a wealth of talent down here.....

Err...I host files for free on my site. I have had about 5 people take advantage of this, maybe its the fact u need to use FTP that makes people not want to take up the offer.

Thanks for the offer Laver2k - but I'm one of those types who likes to keep all my eggs in one basket, If have my stuff on my site I have easy access to it etc, etc. And perhaps you can imagine how I would feel if you took 10 gigs of transfer in 4 days because of my free stuff. That really isn't something I would wish on anyone. However it may be an option if I go the Postnuke route as the "downloads" module of is geared more towards offsite files....

I suppose I can understand wanting to be disconnected if you are running a personal site, but if I was running a business site on that hosting and got shut off for overages, I would be absolutely fuming mad, irate, livid... you get the picture. LOL But if you were running a business you'd actually get a better hosting plan so you wouldn't get cut off. 50Gb really is nowhere near enough if you have a good business. I was actually giving the basic hosting plans for someone who wanted to share their free stuff. I have NEVER been cutoff/shutoff and I have gone over their 'High Resource Policy' more than once. They simple wrote and asked why it happened, and when I explained they replied with 'Oh, ok, not a problem. Just try to be a little more aware of how your bandwidth is consumed.' It's always wise to ask people who actually use a host before jumping to conclusions about how they implement their policies.

I feel it's more wise to read a host's TOS than to go on users personal experiences, since personal experiences wouldn't hold up in court. I didn't mean to argue with you, Xena, I simply meant to point out that their TOS are not typical. Most hosts will not shut you off without notice. And most hosts do disclose their overage charges. Those two items alone are enough to arouse suspicion. Whether you have had a good experience with them doesn't matter in the long run, it's their legal terms that really matter, and the simple fact is that they do not disclose what their overage charges are, which means that if you suddenly get hotlinked or have a run of people downloading items and you get shut off, they might tell you that you now owe them $15 per Gig for overages before they will turn you back on. They may indeed be a good company, but I personally wouldn't take that risk. And yes, 50 Gb is plenty for some types of businesses. A good friend of mine gets alot of business through search engines and although he makes around $20,000 US a month, he only uses around 15 Gb of bandwidth per month. :)

Really what all this has come down to here is not my plan, not my provider etc - 20 gig transfer has always got me by in the past and I was in the top 50 of most downloaded freebies, for me it's about the way Renderosity impliments it's free stuff.

Word is from high that if you change the URL it goes back into the review process and therefore ends up as "what's new" it's only if you change the thumbnail it remains as is (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

So I guess the bottom line is if you have a few downloads in free stuff and change hosts - either be prepared to accept the extra bandwidth or don't renew your downloads.

In my case I guess it's only the Renderosity members who miss out in the long run....

I host my freestuff on my home server connected via DSL (2.5 Mbit/s down, 420 Kbit/s up). No traffic limits, though it isn't as fast as hosting with my provider. And virtually unlimited space. And total control. Agreed, when I offer a new freebie, my DSL connection gets hit pretty hard. But hosting freebies costs me nothing at all (except for the electricity bill, LOL). I don't have a business account (simply because I don't run a business), it's the regular consumer account. I could host some stuff with my provider, but as a consumer I only have 25 Mb of space and a 5 Gb monthly traffic limit. A couple of months ago I tried using that space - well, I hit the traffic limit within 3 days! Slow downloads may be a good thing, only downloaders that really want the item will put up with it. Just my experiences.