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When the bad news that SimpleCDN has become completely unreliable was announced, I immediately started looking into alternatives that are free (i.e. Bittorrent, that's the only alternative). But simultaneously, I contacted a CDN I had been in touch with for some time, asking for their sponsorship. Faster than expected, they agreed. And that's the reason why most of you probably didn't notice anything.

Of course, it took some time to get us up and running perfectly (there are always unforeseen problems and especially with urgent & hasty server migrations). But the team of our new CDN sponsor was actually very understanding and honest when we explained the problems we were having, and went through great lengths into getting us up and running ASAP.

For more than a week now already, the CSS/JS/images of the website have been served by our new CDN. And since 5 days, the DriverPacks themselves are being downloaded from the new CDN. That new CDN is MaxCDN.

They are currently serving about 300 GB of traffic per day for us! So far, their support is stellar, their network is great (and expanding towards Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo will be added), their control panel is the best I've ever seen (and I've seen quite a lot of CDN control panels) and the overall impression is very solid. The only area that could use an upgrade, is the documentation. But if something isn't clear, you can always ask the stellar support, so that's not a very big handicap.

So, please be thankful towards MaxCDN and in case you're looking for a CDN, either to speed up your website or your downloads, please look into MaxCDN. I'm sure you'll like them.

However, we will still be looking into providing the downloads available for download via Bittorrent, so that you will have the freedom of choosing of how to download the DriverPacks. Setting up a tracker that's reliable turned out to be not as simple as it seems, so that we're not committing to any specific date.

A new feature that has been added, is the tracking of the number of downloads of each DriverPack per day. On the main site, you can't ignore the new "Most downloaded" block, that shows today's and this month's most downloaded DriverPacks. Over time, we will add charts, too.

And finally, we need to look into ways to generate more income, to be able to continue running this project. A first and obvious step, is to cease the ability to download/update the Windows 2000/XP/2003 DriverPacks from within the DriverPacks BASE for free. In the first phase, the downloads will stop working, thereby increasing our number of visitors. In the second phase, we are considering to offer users the ability to pay for the comfort of downloading/updating from within DriverPacks BASE. Users who want this would then support us financially. And those who don't really need this (and don't want to or can't support us), can still download the DriverPacks from the website.
(Note that this was not a demand of MaxCDN, but it's only common courtesy to show the ads of the sponsor when using the sponsored service.)

Your feedback is of course welcome, as always!

As many of you may have noticed over the past months, our downloads sponsor SimpleCDN has had increasingly many problems with their infrastructure. Very slow downloads have become quite common and even corrupt downloads have been a major source of frustration from time to time.

Many times, we have contacted them, only to get replies that were all similar: they can't reproduce the problem, they've fixed the problem or — quite often — no reply at all.
Last week, they've promised us to move us to their new infrastructure, but have failed to do so. Since we don't seem to be able to get through to them, we have unfortunately also been unable to get new sponsored credit.

Since the release of the October 2010 DriverPacks, the number of downloads has grown to an amazing rate (20 GB/hour was not uncommon, with >3 TB or >1 million requests in the past week alone). This means that we're now burning rapidly through our remaining credit. This means that by the evening of October 5, GMT at the latest, downloads are likely to stop working (unless SimpleCDN allows us to go negative, which is undocumented).

So, we're now working rapidly on an alternative. We're talking to a possible alternative CDN partner, but chances of success are low there.
The more likely outcome is that we'll launch our own Bittorrent tracker. This implies that the auto-update feature of the DriverPacks BASE will stop working. It will also mean that you can no longer download the DriverPacks with just a browser: you'll have to use a Bittorrent client, such as uTorrent or Transmission.
This will free us from finding a CDN provider that sponsors all bandwidth, and from the alternative: paying for a CDN, which would be absolutely impossible to pay from just the donations that we're getting right now. We'd need several (many) hundreds of dollars of donations every month to be able to pay that, and that's not realistic.

We will keep you posted!

Thanks for your understanding.

UPDATE: We've got the situation completely under control again. We did find a new CDN partner after all. Details will follow soon.