Cutting out the postman.

[ffutures]

Air-mail prices from the UK have risen. This won't immediately affect my prices or the proportion of registration fees I can donate to charity, since my other costs should remain unchanged for the moment, but in the long term it may be necessary to make changes. One possibility I'm considering is offering the FF CD-ROM and Charity CDs as downloads, zipped CD-ROM image, with postal costs removed from their pricing, but both would be VERY large downloads, several hundred megabytes.

What I need to consider is how useful this would be, and if it'd impact my costs for e.g. my web site. So, a couple of questions:

[Poll #1385466]

Comments

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Why not have two prices, one for download and one for hard copy?

CD-sized files won't be a problem for most people. An hour long TV program downloaded from iTunes runs in the 200-300MB range, and they have a lot of customers.

The problem with downloads is going to be on your end: make sure you check to see what your bandwidth limits are, or you could get screwed.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Two prices is the idea - say a pound less for UK customers, two pounds for overseas. Bandwidth is one of the things I need to check - another is file space, I've got about 800mb spare at present, which isn't enough for two disk images plus the other stuff on the site.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

You should look at a new host. Cedant got bought out by aplus.net, and their base plans seem pretty astonishing in comparison:

http://www.aplus.net/hosting/

The cheapest plan is 15GB of storage and 250GB of transfer, frex.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Being US based kills that one, unfortunately. I need a European site for copyright reasons.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

An interesting PS on this - I mentioned this to someone else who has server needs and doesn't have to worry about a US host, and he said:

Actually, they are who we used to host with... ...Hosting companies often offer ridiculous storage/bandwidth knowing that you probably won't use it, because it is cheap enough for them to provide, but when you have a database that eats significant amounts of memory and CPU time they kick you off shared server deals like that as they can't run many CPU intensive sites on the same machine. Those deals require they put several hundred customers on each server...

If you are looking for a host, check the advertising forums on http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=29 - that is very much a buyers market place and you will find hosts offering much better deals there than on their own website.

[kayshapero]

You left out - "My download speed laughs at Gigabytes" :) Mine doesn't, but yeah, as an option download sounds like a good idea, long as it isn't the ONLY one.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

True, it won't be practical for everyone, but it may be worth considering for some.

[ponderoid.livejournal.com]

Lack of a CD/DVD writer shouldn't be an impediment to most people. There are various software packages for every platform that allow you to mount an ISO file as a virtual CD/DVD drive.

*** Ponder

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, but do people know that?

[leoniedelt.livejournal.com]

Linux
(dell D610 laptop)
DVDR/CDRW drive
I can use .zip, .tar.gz, .bzip, etc files.
I can also use ISO images, and things split with hjsplit
There's probably not much out there i can't use
I even have unrar installed so i can undo rar files.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK, so that's the more expert end. Thanks!

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

My something else is not always a useful addition....

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to ask...

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Note icon. That is the mouse he has his head on!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Sorry, not very observant obviously...