One of the fastest growing Game Maker services so far this year has been Josh Conley’s file-hosting website UpUrLoad.
Although it is a general file hosting site it is clearly targeted towards Game Maker users and unlike many Game Maker websites there has been a good rate of improvement since launch with new features regularly being added and more in the development pipeline.
The clean design, unobtrusive advertising and has helped the site gain over 150 registered accounts. The 1,900 uploaded files, which are mainly downloaded from the official Game Maker Community, use about 15GB of bandwidth a month.
Here is a short question and answer session with Josh:
Are you aiming to have the position that WillHostForFood had?
I hope to get as many people as 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 hope to get into the position where I have a lot of people using and enjoying the site for free but not so much that may make my host unhappy or require me to pay more.
Although I have had a few donations, (thanks again to those people!) I don’t have enough user support financially to fund the site. Therefore I must pay for the hosting myself, which is good because I host everything I need and then have a lot of extra space and bandwidth for UpUrLoad.com users. If I were to get in to the position where I have to pay more myself for hosting than now, I would have to make a few restraints on UpUrLoad.com to slow down the use of space/bandwidth. Though I do not expect that I will get into this position very quickly and I don’t think that it is something I need to worry about at this time.
Now thinking in the present, UpUrLoad has a ton of space and bandwidth so I encourage everyone to join and use the site.
Many sites come online with a fanfare and are then neglected by their creators, how have you managed to keep the momentum at UpUrLoad?
I always like to add little useful features which keep me into the site and more and more I am seeing my name get wiped off of the first page of the users online list even though I log in everyday (The names are sorted by who was online last). This never used to happen as only about 3 or 4 people logged in everyday. Now there are much more users being active on the site which encourages me to keep working/supporting the site as much as I can.
As well as the main UpUrLoad site you run the Linked online highscore service, do you have plans for any more services to benefit Game Maker users?
Free services that I have provided such as UpUrLoad.com and Linked were created in my spare time to help encourage Game Maker users to develop games quickly and to be able to share them easily and free. At the moment I don’t have plans for any new services, but if an idea comes that could potentially benefit developers then I will get right to work on it and hope people will love it!
I too avoid any GM filehosting sites…but this one has stayed active, at least, for a long time compared to others I have seen. Personally I use host-a.net, but I like supporting GM projects…If a stable host came up and stayed around for long enough, I’d definitely consider moving.
I recommend FileFront for hosting your games… they have a 600 MB limit per file, which is pretty awesome.
Plus you can easily find out the direct link of the download… click your own download, then copy and paste the “Download not started? Click here to try again” link, or something similar to that.
You can then put up your own website (tons of free hosting sites with no ads), have a download button that links to the direct link from FileFront.
FileFront: http://filefront.com/
There’s no bandwidth limitations, or total size of files for one account. The 600 MB limitation for each file is basically the only one.
Thanks for the review Phil. And @Fred I have to agree with you, but I try to think of it as sharing hosts. I host the users files so they don’t use silly annoying host’s that are littered with ads and have lots of restrictions.
As I mentioned, I don’t plan on having a ton of users join so I am not too worried, and I do monitor the bandwidth usage, disk usage, etc.
I still wouldn’t recommend anyone host anything on one of these sites that they want to be able to access in the long term. The success rate of such sites created by members of the GMC is abysmal (I believe @Brad had one which died) as they simply do not generate sufficient revenue to be sustainable and by their very nature are resource intensive if they are successful.
I’m always wary of the startup file hosting sites that crop up here and there on GMC.
For one, bandwidth and file space – WHFF is a good example of what happens when growth in those areas outpaces funding and development. If the site goes down because the proprietor didn’t plan ahead for these things, a lot of people are affected.
And second, I think security and privacy are very important – and with small startup hosting sites, you never know what you’re going to get. Are files encrypted? Are user details, especially passwords, encrypted? Are directories given proper permissions? Etc, etc.
Decent article, but I would have liked GMB to cover this with just a little more depth.
@FredFredrickson
I agree that a lot of people are affected when a web hosting site goes down, but the number of people affected could be reduced if the website gave some notification (and doesn’t just go offline suddenly). If the web host creator could manage to pay for one additional month before going offline, I think that would give people plenty of time to gather all of their files off the website and update their links to another host.
@Brad
That’d be nice, and it is probably something file hosts should do, but if you’re not sure if you’re going to make enough money for the next month of hosting, the last thing you want to do is discourage users from getting onto the site – all that will do is guarantee that you won’t make your quota. And the users all pulling their files off at once will bog down your site and could potentially put you over bandwidth limits.
The fact of the matter is, file hosting is a tough business to get into. You have to constantly monitor the activities of your site so you can tune the limits to suit both your audience and yourself, and you have to be aggressive with advertising. The file hosting sites that are “successful” (read: persisting) suck because they are covered in ads and have limits that box free users in – but they are like that because that’s probably the only way they can make it.
Regardless, I’ve seen enough of these startup file hosts go down to know that, as Philip mentioned below, they aren’t a good bet for long term file storage. In a way, it’s a shame that so many people target the GMC with these sorts of sites, because even with a month or two advance notice, losing a file host that many in the community use is a drag for everyone.