WillHostForFood starved
November 19, 2009
One of the most popular file hosting services used by Game Maker Community members has today gone offline. WillHostForFood had been online for 2 and a half years and hosted over 200GB of content belonging to over 5,000 members.
To get an idea of the popularity of the site Google returns “about 79,000” results to a query for pages on the gmc.yoyogames.com domain containing the phrase “willhostforfood”.
The reason for the closure is the expense of hosting member files which consume 1.5Tb of data a month incurring costs of “$150” a month. By comparison the latest figures we have for YoYoGames.com are “upwards of 10TB a month“. The site was put up for sale a week ago with an asking price of $1000 but no buyers came forward.
[…] able to access your files until the server is restored and if the downtime is more permanent, think WillHostForFood, your files may be gone for […]
[…] I can using it much like WillHostForFood, but with popularity comes a price. As many people know, WHFF went down due to a large amount of traffic that came too quickly for the developers to pay for and support. I […]
pls naruto fire vs sound……pls download link
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the whff guy is an idiot. why would you close down a site. for money reasons i can understand. but if you have so many people that rely on your site. cmon. Ass
Are you stupid?
[…] looks at various file hosts that may or may not be aimed specifically at Game Maker. With the abrupt shutdown of the popular “Will Host For Food”, this episode may be a great resource for people […]
@camzmac
Phil got pwned! 🙂
[quote]To get an idea of the popularity of the site Google returns “about 79,000″ results to a query for pages on the gmc.yoyogames.com domain containing the phrase “willhostforfood”.[/quote]
A Google search for “host-a.net” site:gmc.yoyogames.com returns “about 219,000” results.
ChIkEn AtE mY dOnUtS sig at the GMC currently says: “Sorry, WHFF is gone. I had to. Even if I get enough money your files will not come back, it will just re-open fresh.”
🙄
Thank you for slightly advertising that. Maybe now that WHFF is down, My GM Host (The simplest file host around) will see an increase in traffic.
I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did considering how high the payments were. I’m also surprised that people from the GMC would be paying that kind of money. Especially for a free service.
Coolist and Hach-Que, this isn’t a place for your ads. 😛
I really don’t care, I use My GM Host and Host-A.
@Coolist
That’s a good service you got there. Why didn’t I see this before? I’ll use UpUrLoad next time I want to quicky upload something in WHFF-esque style.
This is saddening to a great degree. I didn’t exactly use this site very much, but I enjoyed it better than quite a number of file hosting sites.
Hopefully there was a backup or something. I’m pretty sure I have all the files that were uploaded, but some people might not.
They didn’t backup files? RoketGames automatically backs up all the files every month, and the SQL databases every night (on the server).
Surely as a file host they could have automated offsite backups as well.
I moved on from WHFF a while ago…Using host-a.net is just so easy and reliable.
http://www.upurload.com/ is a free hosting site up to 100mb and you don’t need an account. (I just thought I would advertise it since I have the chance, and it is related) I also do backup the files and I have prepaid for hosting. (I don’t pay monthly so my host can’t cut me off)
A part of me cries harder than I have ever cried before. I loved them and their hotlinking services. I can not beieve they are gone! They cant’t be gone! Nooooo!!!!!!!
WHFF was all about the convenience.
It shouldn’t be.
All things on the internet are transitory. Get used to it.
I seriously hope, no expect, that they will have suitable recent backup. Especially since the content hasn’t been created by them. They are were a filehost after all. If they didn’t take backups (and even if they didn’t their host must of) I am glad they lost the data now rather than waiting for more people to trust them with their content.
This is why you should use an established (not GM specific run by a couple of bored teens) host for anything you care about.
“I received an email saying WHFFs files were deleted”
So much for offsite backup…?
For me, WillHostForFood was like the Opera of file hosting. It was buggy and some of the pages didn’t show up right. But like Opera, I used it for almost everything. I can’t explain why I put my files on such an unstable site, but I just felt it was the right thing to do. I know every single site I run will have broken links now, and yet somehow I feel bad updating them. Maybe I’ll give it a week or two, to let them mourn.
It’s a shame, really.
My files were deleted a few days ago, but I wasn’t expecting the site to go down.