Due to its ever growing popularity, Blend Swap is running into bandwidth limitations. In order to prevent a total site meltdown, they are now introducing a new download policy: unregistered users can download 100MB/week and registered users who share models can download up to 150MB/week.
Matthew and Jonathan elaborate on the background of this change on the Blend Swap blog. It sounds like a wise decision to me, and running into these limitations is definitely good news ;-)
16 Comments
Makes alot of sense
Perhaps a torrent type system could work, that way models could be also downloaded from peers
Just an idea
I agree with the new policy and I hope to be soon one of the registered users who share models :)
totally agree.
They might benefit from using the torrent model. Then at least high-traffic items will have the load dispersed. I do hope they consider this.
I always try to stay within less 100MB for user to developed further in their own projects.I was wondering what had happen?At first I though it was Autodesk first wage of attack,in the future please send us an email before any changes please.
Why don't you move over to dreamhost,com? It's got unlimited bandwidth.
dreamhost,com have too many complaints.
@yahoo-AREXO5MV4ZYED3OME4YY77TYPM:disqus Hmmm... I'm okay with Dreamhost.com. I'm curious to know what the factual complaints (forums or links). Thanks
I posted this at blendswap, will post here as well
Hey guys, good to see this discussion, I can see you all have some
really good ideas for blendswap and we will be taking all ideas in when
blendswap makes it's changes over the next few weeks.
So as the hosting provider guy I'm going to explain some things about bandwidth.
Yes with a more powerful server (VPS) we do have a limit of 1Tb (1000Gb)
It is a sacrifice to exchange unlimited bandwidth for power, but with a
website processing tens of millions of page requests per month it was
simply too unstable on shared hosting.
We realize we could store just the blends on a shared server, but by
doing that we risk being banned and losing all the blends, as in the
fine-print you will notice hosting providers don't allow shared hosts to
be used for file sharing.
The limit of 100Mb has been well thought out, and will only affect a
few users, as the majority of you download only a few Mb each week. But
there are some that download over 1Gb of data.
If you require a model that will take you over your limit, Contact an admin, tell us why you need it, and we may send it to you.
The users that actually get involved in the community and use blendswap as it's meant to be we are happy to help out.
Remember that Blendswap is a community driven site, for models to be
uploaded for comments and critiques, but currently it is being used for
people to get free models without leaving any comments or rating.
For example take a look at the uploads on blendswap, there are models
with hundreds if not thousands of downloads, with only a handful of
ratings and comments.
So I leave you with this,
If you download the model and use it, or learn something from it, or
even have some suggestions, leave a comment, or at least take the time
to vote, it only takes one click, it's the least you can do for someone
that is providing you with their work for nothing.
We do have plans for blendswap to grow into a dedicated server,
But for this to happen we need to see the blendswap community actually getting involved.
Perhaps if blendswap implemented a ranking system with a points based rank.
i.e: points for comments, points for ratings, points for blends
Of course adding the ability to vote up or down comments to ensure quality comments etc
Similar to what is seen on kongregate
So keep coming with your thoughts, What could blendswap do to help you get involved in the community?
Would you strive to get a kick ass rank?
Or get rewarded for submitting highly ranked models?
Jump over to the blendswap post and let us know!
http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/news/blend-swap-download-changes/#comments
"... but with a website processing tens of millions of page requests per month it was simply too unstable on shared hosting."
Are you saying that BlendSwap was having tens of millions of pageviews a month? o.O
Yes my statistics show over 13 million requests last month
Is that 'pages' or 'hits'? I can hardly believe 13 million pages - that's almost 3 times as much as Blender.org!
Yes 'hits', sorry the stats say page requests, but all files are regarded as pages.
WHM of course
lol
Actual PHP page requests only a small percent of that.
Though all hits count towards overloading servers, that is why that value was mentioned.
Sorry for the confusion
Yes, absolutely. I ran into the same problem on BN where all the graphics were served by Apache/PHP, killing my server. I first offloaded static content to a CDN (MaxCDN), and have now switched to CloudFlare, a free service. It's truly awesome, the site has become a *LOT* faster since then.
all makes sense...an index of torrents may help too.