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.

If necessary I can disable downloading games above a certain size. Uploading will still be possible.

As a moderator moved over from the old MacGarden site, I would agree with this one.

In this case, we could think about how to solve the download problem later, if neccessary.

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.

Ok, Thanks, you made yourself very clear, now I know I've been a leecher all this time,
(no wonder why when I downloaded -Journey man -and -prisioner of Ice- was quite fast ! haha)
anyway, I use the FREE DOWNLOAD MANAGER for torrents and it works much better and faster than Ares. so, I guess I'll just leave it open while I do other things.

THX!

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.