Hosting, etc.
So check it out. It’s no secret that ezarchive, our hosting provider, has been nothing short of awful over the past few months, going down for hours at a time, making uploads nearly impossible and frustrating pretty much everyone involved on a regular basis. This is presumably the result of their servers being unable to adequately handle the massive amount of bandwith stress put on them as a result of the company’s ever-growing customer base, which has expanded exponentially since the company’s birth as a result of the consistently-growing popularity of mp3 blogs and the fact that ez is the most cost-effective solution for your average blogger looking for an easy way to host their files. To address these issues, ez is introducing ezarchive 3.0, a massive overhaul featuring larger, faster servers but also bandwith and file transfer limits, as well as a somewhat mysterious sound quality clause that states: “Shared music files will be played at a lower quality than in EZArchive 2.0 outside of your archive, while still being enjoyable for your friends to listen to.” I don’t know exactly what that means for us, and I won’t know for certain until we get our shit together and upgrade (which will hopefully be tomorrow), but I don’t exactly like the sound of it so we may be looking for a new hosting provider.
Worst of all, after upgrading to 3.0 all of our current mp3 links will be dead until we transfer them to our new account, so basically you’ll be unable to download anything on the site that’s hosted on ezarchive (pretty much everything). Awesome! Everett and I are working hard to figure out what exactly we’re going to do and are in the market for some alternative hosting solutions, so if you’ve got anything to suggest by all means fire away in the comments. I know webspace and bandwith costs are dramatically cheaper outside of the US (or at least in Canada), so if anyone has access to a Canadian (or other international) server and wants to help us out we’d be forever indebted to you, and you could expect a large number of gift packs overflowing with musical goodness to be sent your way in the immediate future. We’re also toying around with the idea of using MediaFire.com, a free hosting site that doesn’t produce direct links (see: You Send It, Rapidshare, MegaUpload, et. al) but makes a file available for download without wait times or cluttered, confusing advertising and pop-ups. This means you wouldn’t be able to download the mp3s directly via right-clicking and “save target as”-ing, but simply following the link would produce a download link for the file immediately. I loved being able to produce direct links for files and have them accessible directly from the site, but this may be the only solution. Any ideas? Let us know in the comments.
Seriously. We’re desperate.