It turns out data traffic costs money.
Most people who watch the dancing video watch the streaming version on my front page via the embedded YouTube player. This is easy to put up and it costs me nothing. The fine folks at YouTube somehow swallow all the bandwidth costs without ever having to hit up content creators or viewers for cash. Whatever "webenomics" hoodoo they’re invoking, it’s not my problem.
99% of people who come to watch the video are satisfied with that option. But I also want to provide higher-quality versions that people can download and save on their computers, so I have a page on my site with links to Windows Media and Quicktime renders. Each time those files are downloaded, it’s a direct hit to my site host of 50MB or so.
Accommodating that 1% who go for the big downloads is proving very troublesome. Turns out it still adds up to tens of thousands of people, which translates into several terrabytes per month of data transfer, which no one seems willing to let me get away with.
My previous site host slapped a massive overage bill on me to account for the enormous public demand that I had little-to-no control over. The money-back guarantee ultimately spared me from a crushing blow to the wallet.
I crawled back to my previous site host, but I’ve now been booted by them as well. They were nice enough to simply block access to the videos rather than start charging fees. Still, I’m left with no method of distribution.
I’m like Moses wandering the desert with my tribe of compressed video files. We’ve been kicked out of everywhere. I seek the Promised Land.
…cutting to the chase, I need some help. I need a place to store about 300MB of video files that’ll be downloaded several thousand times and eat up a lot of bandwidth. Fortunately, demand is slowing. But at the moment it’s still pretty high.
I’m hoping not to have to pay for this storage space, wherever it is, and I’m hoping not to have to pay for traffic.
If you have any leads, I’m easy to reach.
Thanks!