Topic: SimpleCDN unresponsive: downloads may be compromised [UPDATE]
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.
Last edited by Wim Leers (2010-10-07 23:57:10)