Hi yall, I would like your recommendations and suggestions on where to host my game web site and files. I'm planning to distribute and sell it through the web site so the buyers will be downloading it from there. My major target is North America and Europe. If you know a good web hosting company please post it's web site address or other contacts on this thread. Thanx.

How large are your files? How many downloads are you expecting? Is it important to scale up quickly if required?

The files will be between 500 and 700 MB, I'm expecting 100-300 downloads per day.
If by scale up you mean that the bandwidth be allocated for more downloads if there's a lot of demand then no.

Yikes [smile]. You won't get any consumer hosting packages worthy of that kind of bandwidth or processing power. So go with a shared or dedicated hosting package. Most start with a couple of TB transfer, but after that you are paying ~$1 per GB unless you make a deal with your provider.

Any large provider will give you a decent deal, try godaddy and the guys i'm hosted with, Rackmounted.com. If you KNOW you are going to need way more than a few TB's then contact them personaly or look for a provider offering deals on much more bandwidth.

That, or you could submit your files for hosting on fileplanet, filefront etc. Might be worth providing a Bit Torrent download too.

>> Might be worth providing a Bit Torrent download too.

That is probably the best suggestion. It isn't hard to find a host permitting torrents on their servers, if you shop around you can find one that will let you run a client (with bandwidth caps, of course).

Just under 300 daily downloads of 700MB data = 6TB/month. When you consider interrupted downloads that get restarted, a simple FTP transfer of the files will cost quite a bit of money. With that many downloads, a torrent will keep you well underneath the 1TB limit.

If that fails, you can always keep your own computer on 24/7 and constantly seed the torrent. If you have DSL or cable, that shouldn't be an issue figuring about 100 or so machines on the network, and a few seeders, you'd be able to keep your files up with very little bandwidth after it has been pushed out to a few initial clients.

Many of the hosting companies won't let you run daemons nor give you dedicated IP addresses (which you will really need for your BitTorrent client), so shop around.