Tim,

Just to let you know: with the new website the downloads are quite slow
for me. Though I have a 16 Mbit connection, it takes about 4 minutes to
download a 13.6 MB file. No problems with other sites.

P.S. Times are changing - 2 years ago I'd have been very happy about
this performance.

Regards Uli

Uli,

<< Just to let you know: with the new website the downloads are quite slow
for me. Though I have a 16 Mbit connection, it takes about 4 minutes to
download a 13.6 MB file. No problems with other sites. >>

During peak download times, you may not see the best download performance
due to the load on our T1.  Have you seen this issue at off-times, that is,
not right after a new build or release ?

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

I'm averaging about 80-95KB/s download speed. This being approx 50% of the T1 capacity that they have is normal assuming other traffic on the link as well.

Tim - have you considered "cloud hosting" of the installer files (even as a backup for your site)?
We've been using the Amazon S3 ourselves for few years now with great success - it's dirt cheap and API allows generating time-limited links so you can still control all of it from your sire without giving away actual file location.

Raul

Tim,

> Have you seen this issue at
> off-times, that is, not right after a new build or release ?

I think so, because I downloaded the latest builds just some days after
they were announced.
But I'll check that once more tomorrow in the morning (German time).
There shouldn't be much traffic in the USA then.

Uli

Raul,

<< Tim - have you considered "cloud hosting" of the installer files (even as
a backup for your site)? We've been using the Amazon S3 ourselves for few
years now with great success - it's dirt cheap and API allows generating
time-limited links so you can still control all of it from your sire without
giving away actual file location. >>

I'll look into it.  The issue has always been what you mention - having
actual URLs present that can be accessed publicly.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

<< I'll look into it.  The issue has always been what you mention - having
actual URLs present that can be accessed publicly. >>

This is solved nicely by S3 and likely something similar is available for other cloud storage type services.

Basically what you do is create a private bucket (i.e. folder) and mark all objects (files) inside also private - each of your actual setup exe files would be one of these objects. Since it's all private nobody but you have access.

Now you can generate a time-expiry link from your website and provide that link to customers and even if they save the link once the time expires the link dies and they lose access.

It's fairly straightforward so you can do it in your download area and generate a new link for every download request (that's valid for few minutes for example).

Amazon calls it " Query String Authentication" and brief description is here:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/S3_QSAuth.html

Raul

Tim,

Wednesday, 7:26 GMT:
13.6 MB downloaded in 120 seconds.

Regards Uli

Raul,

<< Basically what you do is create a private bucket (i.e. folder) and mark
all objects (files) inside also private - each of your actual setup exe
files would be one of these objects. Since it's all private nobody but you
have access. >>

Cool, thanks for the info.  I looked into it yesterday, but it was all a bit
hard to decipher at first.  I'll have to do some calculations on how much it
will cost, also.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Uli,

<< Wednesday, 7:26 GMT:
13.6 MB downloaded in 120 seconds. >>

From our logs, I'm seeing an average download time of around 195 secs for
the ElevateDB Additional Software and Utilities (14MB).  Not great, but not
bad (70KB per second), and this includes a lot of apparently really-bad
connections that take a long time to download.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

<<  I'll have to do some calculations on how much it will cost, also.>>

Main question is whether you think it would benefit the business and is it worthwhile spending your time coding the website (instead of coding EDB/DBISAM).  I'm sure most of us can live just fine with the 5 minute download for new release + addl tools every now and then.

The cost we found to be cheap  - it's basically $0.15 to store 1GB per month and same for 1GB of transfer. You'd have to estimate how many customers would download the product. Assuming most of your customers download approx 100MB a month (release for few different environments) and you have 1000 of them it would be approx $15 per month as an estimate.

If you do decide to go ahead then let me know - I've written a command line utility for managing S3 and uploads that can easily be added to automated build process (or batch file).

Raul