There wasn’t all that much of a comparison in my last post about game file hosts as I reviewed the first file host mygmgame. At least now I have something to compare further sites I test with.
Next in the firing line is Host-A which appears to be one of the most popular file hosts currently at the GMC judging from the number of people who post Host-A download links and claims to offer ‘free file hosting for the masses’, as opposed to what?
At registration I am pleased to note that my 120 character e-mail address, as we all have, was acceptable – however the captcha test was a little tricky for my liking.
The dashboard is certainly better than mygmgame – however I have to admit I’m no fan of sites with dark backgrounds and light coloured text. It appears you can get extra bandwidth if you refer new people to join Host-A using your link, however this suggests that bandwidth, as well as storage space, is limited. Indeed 550MB of bandwidth is all that a new account is given for a month which really is pathetic.
There’s no progress bar or indication as to how much of my file has already been uploaded as I wait to see if the file is accepted by Host-A. What joy, what joy an error appears. So I go back and try again.
This second attempt is more successful and the file uploads. I am given an option of two linking methods and code can be generated in either HTML or BBCode – a feature which was lacking with mygmgame.
The link provided appears to link directly to the file however when it is visited up comes a page prompting me to select a mirror – I have a choice of 1, or download directly from the site. I take my time selecting the only mirror available, it’s such a hard choice and the download begins after about 5 seconds.
Or when I say begins I mean prompts me for a save location. The file does not actually start to download.
So Host-A is a miserable failure in this test. File space is limited to a measly 20MB, whilst bandwidth has a pathetic 550MB/month limit. Despite the fact that my download didn’t actually commence by bandwidth was still used up. The site seems more concerned about having people upgrade to get features which available free elsewhere such as reasonable amount of bandwidth and storage space.
“Or when I say begins I mean prompts me for a save location. The file does not actually start to download.”
That’s why there’s the “download direct from Host-A” option. Around late may, coral cache was having some issues and went offline for a while, and that caused the only “mirror link” on the download pages to be non-functional.
You might be thinking, “Why not just have ONE download link, linking to Host-A only?”. Because the congestion would be unbearable. Whereas adding a Coral Cache link as a mirror relieves this problem. Keep in mind both won’t be perfect, so that’s why there’s two. The internet was designed with redundancy in mind, with the core networks designed knowing that no equipment will have perfect operation and uptime. So we still keep two links on the download page (at least) to keep reliability high. Just because one link doesn’t work doesn’t mean it should be the whiney topic of the day. Be glad that someone thought of having a backup link when the other wasn’t working!
We are also adding more mirrors, as we are working on a mirror system with additional privately controlled servers (coral cache is a free internet service). Once those are in place, I can multiply the bandwidth given to users by how many mirrors we have online. We also purchased a connection upgrade recently with our adsense money, this allows us to increase user bandwidth, albeit slowly. (This is to ensure that the site doesn’t become overridden with too many downloads to process if we make one huge bandwidth jump).
The primary Host-A server (and subsequently all the others we have yet in install) are privately owned and operated (eg. no shared hosting), we do our own maintenance on the physical server hardware. The reason we charge $$ for what other providers do for free is because those other providers exist for hit-and-run length of times, going down because they get spammed with too many files and downloads. The oldest accounts and files on Host-A date back to October 2004, and we have no intention of purging old files and accounts because it’s our goal to not be a hit-and-run file hosting provider. By putting more restrictive limits on individual accounts, it allows us to provide lengthier and more reliable service.
Sure, go to the latest and hippest gigabyte uploader around, the one being touted as a “freewebs replacement”, but keep in mind that Host-A, in the camzmac.no-ip.com days (early 2004) was originally promoted as a “freewebs replacement”, and it caught on because of that. It still remains a popular hosting option because we still want to achieve an adequate freewebs replacement and at the same time be an active role-model of the idea of reliability as a fashionable hosting philosophy.
I’ll check out your moogle blog and will catch you on messenger sometime.
hey guys,
In regards to your interest in MoogleWebs
I’m giving you exclusive access to my new blog:
http://mooglecreations.blogspot.com/
I just used blogspot cause I couldn’t be bothered creating a php blog system myself – not much point when I can use their system in 5 minutes 😀
In the blog I’ll be announcing new features on MoogleWebs and GMR and ways you can support the projects. You can also give me valuable feedback and make feature suggestions etc. As I said to Phil a little while back two heads in better than 1. So 50 would be better. But we wanna keep the blog on the low as we don’t want people messing with anything. You can tell some friends just make sure they don’t upload illegal content or whatever.
Hey guys, I created a blog for you to keep up to date with my latest progress’s on my sites 😀
http://mooglecreations.blogspot.com/
It’s an exclusive club 😀
Remember to always check it and give me feedback on creations 😀
Well we are doing webwork already – we haven’t had time to get our own website up because we’ve been doing paid webwork. If you want a quote let me know what you want and we’ll sort something out 🙂
Let me know when you get the main mm site up and you’re ready to take some work as I have a site I am interested in getting a quote for.
Wow. It looks like it could really be useful.
I’d be very interested to support this project in some way…
Impressive 🙂
It’s pretty similar to freewebs, but not slow, no ads, more flexible and easier to use (in some aspects).
Here’s a preview:
http://www.mooglemedia.com/mooglewebs/createtheme.php
It doesn’t save the theme yet, but it will eventually. Basically the above page creates a theme, which you can then apply to a compatible template. Now it will be a while before I get even the beta of the site up. But I figured I’d just give the valued GMB members a little taste.
…a “Freewebs killer”? Normally I’d be worried, but this idea sounds…exciting.
What does it do then?
I just started work on a freewebs killer. It’s a long way off yet, but hopefully I will eventually finish it 😀 We’ll see how I go…
Grego and JassInc spring to mind, although I’m not certain.
..and free time, ofcourse.
A service GMking.org used to maintain is OpenLoad (http://openload.info). Unfortunately, due to other services such as the Wiki, MarkUp, forum, work, and personal life – OpenLoad wasn’t regularly updated and currently has problems.
Maybe you could ‘fix us up’ with someone good at Perl/PHP? 😀