medlinke Posted September 28, 2003 Share Posted September 28, 2003 Let me preface this post with a disclaimer... I love cmmods.com. I think it is an awesome undertaking, and it has added a lot of the community. This post isn't meant to me mean spirited at all. -------------------------- Are there any alternatives to cmmods.com? It is just very slow and it's taking me forever on a cable connection to download files. I think the fastest I've been able to nab files is like 48K. Does the speed fluctuate with the time of day, etc? Just looking for ways to get some of the larger terrain and sound files in an easier, less time consuming way. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KG_Jag Posted September 28, 2003 Share Posted September 28, 2003 It is a fantastic site and service to the CM community. However, there are some large mods that just can't be downloaded from the site with a dial up connection--even if you run it on a weeknight when you should be sleeping. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medlinke Posted September 28, 2003 Author Share Posted September 28, 2003 Originally posted by jagcommander: ...even if you run it on a weeknight when you should be sleeping. I have a cable connection as per my initial post. I checked my connection speed and I'm at 1.4 Mbs 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medlinke Posted September 28, 2003 Author Share Posted September 28, 2003 It looks like it's a problem with my ISP...which is kind of what I figured since it always had good service with my old one (comcast vs. a local company ECI which is the ONLY one I can use in my new place) I'm dropping packets left and right to the IP of the site, and cannot even do a good trace route to it...very strange that it appears to be just that one site, but I suppose it could have a lot to do with how that site is hosted. It sounds like the site might be on the owners own machines, and he might be hosting it out of his house. So that could be the problem because that one IP may be causing me problems. I'm pretty clueless as to how to fix it...I may be OOL on this one which would really blow. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eichenbaum Posted September 28, 2003 Share Posted September 28, 2003 Datatransfer does cost a lot of money. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lou2000 Posted September 28, 2003 Share Posted September 28, 2003 I agree with you that cmmods can be slow, and that it is a great asset to the CM community, but I dont think you'll find any alternatives. Like eichenbaum said .... bandwidth costs money .... quite a bit of it. The Proving Grounds used to be the place for mods, but I think I'm right in saying that the huge bandwidth requirements/costs took their toll. It's now back as popular as ever, but as a multiplayer / scenario development site :cool: There were others but they all became a victim of their own success .... and our 'need' for the latest mods CM mods website hosts are in a no win situation. To provide a faster service they need to pay out more cash, to afford this they need to charge mod downloaders. Not enough people would be willing to pay to make this viable ... so the site would fail. Keep it free and site is going to be slower, but the site survives. I'm just glad that there are CM web designers willing to put so much effort into the ALL sites we use, often at a loss....nevermind a profit. Lou2000 PS - if you do get a good connection to CM mods ... try downloading GreenAsJades McMMM mod manager :cool: and check out his tread in the Tips & Tricks forum. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medlinke Posted September 28, 2003 Author Share Posted September 28, 2003 Good response. I totally understand that and as I said in my original post, I find cmmods to be awesome myself, that's why it's such a bummer that my new provider seems to have a problem getting to the site somewhere along the line! As for bandwidth costs... Check out: http://www.readyhosting.com You get unmetered bandwidth 500 megs of space free email accounts (unlimited), ftp access all the bells and whistles (you can upgrade to SQL Server 2000 for 25 bucks a year even. All for 99 bucks a year. I've been with them since October 99 and while they may be weak on .NET support or true Coldfusion hosting they've been pretty excellent otherwise. (They don't do MySQL at all...which sucks big time, but I don't use it anyway I'm a SQL guy) I have been a host for all the new patches that have come out including the 33 meg 1.01 patch. I did over 12 gigs of traffic on my site in 3 weeks and never even got an email from my hosting company. The only thing they ask is that you alert them if you anticipate high traffic because they will move your site to servers specifically set up to handle it. My peak month I did about 18 gigs of traffic in pictures, MP3s of a local band and live Dave Matthews Band MP3s (totally legal which readyhosting did question until I sent them the statement from DMB clearing it), a bunch of big files that I was working with in a Computer Science class and such. Again I never heard from them. I expect that MOD hosters probably do somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 Gigs of data transfer a month with uploads, downloads and the like. I also assume that cmmods probably hosts somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 - 5 gigs of MODS at this point on the low end. I definitely understand that there are problems with securing bandwidth, which is why it might be good to set up some kind of distributed model (like a Tucows kind of thing) cmmods.com ----------------- This becomes the host of the database and the main upload area for modders. Mods fall into 5 categories: Vehicles Infantry Sounds & Music Interface and misc markers Terrain Depending on which category it falls into there would be 2-3 hosts out there for EACH TYPE that would receive an email saying there has been a new upload in the category you host. That site www.modhost1.com would go and download the mod and transfer the settings into their database for hosting. The only thing that would change is the link on the cmmods.com site. Basically modhost1.com serves as a mirror for the file. Another site www.modhost2.com would go and download the file as well. Again a new link would be added showing a mirror to the file. This process could go until there are three hosts. After modhost1.com has the file though (this is the important part) cmmods.com could remove the file from their server. This may mean that when modhost2.com gets there the file is gone, but they could go and get it from modhost1.com and then just add the link back in at cmmods.com at a later date. In this way the bandwidth is distributed, not all files would necessarily be hosted multiple places, but it could ensure that: 1) There would be redundancy in the system 2) We could reduce bandwidth costs to the few brave souls who host mods 3) Encourage more people to host At 99 bucks a year I think most everyone could host 500 megs of mods. That's less than 10 bucks a month and like I said it's totally unmetered. So, if like 10 people did it would reduce the strain on cmmods.com and give everyone faster downloads. Just a thought. It would be fairly complicated though because you'd have to coordinate everyone with a new role of Mod Hoster...which would essentially mean that cmmods.com would have three roles: 1) Downloader 2) Mod Author 3) Host Each role has different rights obviously. Then a communication system would have to be implemented which would not be hard, but usually there is a fair amount of playing around with the settings to get it to work right... Just a thought...or wishful thinking!!! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WWB Posted September 28, 2003 Share Posted September 28, 2003 I dont want to speak ColumbusOHGamer, but IIRC his site is running on Domino (find a cheap host with that!). However, there might be a solution here. Depending on how the package thing is coded, it might not be entirely impossible to set it up so that the site is running on the current server, but the mods themselves (the part that is slow AFAIK) are hosted at a 3rd party site, such as suggested above. This might well be the least work/most benefit solution. WWB PS: Any idea why they dont have .NET support. It is pretty much a free addon. Installing it barely even requires a restart. [ September 28, 2003, 12:45 PM: Message edited by: wwb_99 ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medlinke Posted September 29, 2003 Author Share Posted September 29, 2003 Originally posted by wwb_99: PS: Any idea why they dont have .NET support. It is pretty much a free addon. Installing it barely even requires a restart. I'm not entirely sure. I know early on they claimed that there were significant implementation costs involved in installing it on their servers and with users affecting server stability by not testing it locally and having things go wrong on the live servers. They have it now for 199.00 bucks a year. Not a bad deal considering the benefits if you are really married to .NET. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eichenbaum Posted September 29, 2003 Share Posted September 29, 2003 Unmetered Data Transfer Unmetered Data Transfer means just that. We don't meter the amount of traffic you use. You won't get a surprise bill for additional bandwidth. This means that unless your site compromises the performance of the web server (which, by the way, probably won't happen), or the performance of our network - we don't care how much traffic you have. Your site should be successful. Keep in mind that we don't allow Adult, mp3 download, or software download sites. I think that CMMODS could influence the server's performens. You're talking about Bitmaps and Wave files here. Don't even know if 500 MB is enough for hosting all of the files. And the 99 dollars you're talking about has an * ... : * = Setup fee of $50 may apply Sorry I'm a bit sceptic about this service. It sounds very good, much better then the service I have with my own host. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ColumbusOHGamer Posted September 29, 2003 Share Posted September 29, 2003 Since you are all looking for an alternative, but are guessing at the requirements, let me try to help you out. Current set of CMBB & CMBO mods requires: 3GB of disk space Avg. ~3GB/day, peak 8+GB/day (And that is only .zip files!) Go look here (www.cmmods.com d/l stats) to see the data stats. It does not include any overhead for page text or the preview images. I estimate those to take an additional 10%-20% of bandwidth, but that's just my guess. So you need to account for a maximum of 150GB/month (and 5GB/day). But remember, that is on my "slow" connection. A faster connection would probably get more downloads. So maybe you'll need 200GB/month (and 7GB/day). Show that to the ISP and then ask if they are willing to host it (I'm sure cmmods can be re-written in MySQL or something). I can't imagine they would allow it for anything less than $150/month. More likely is $250/month for partial T-1. I hope this information has helped. Please let us know if you find anything out. COG 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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