Please take the time to read this it affects you!
A letter from Matthew Muldoon, owner of Blend Swap.
Over the past 3 years I have seen Blend Swap become more than I had ever expected. It has grown leaps and bounds, from the first official Durian Modeling Sculpt, to hitting the 2,000 model mark on the site just a few weeks back, and starting the development on version 4 of the website. These are things I could have never imagined happening when I started this site.
It has been amazing, but along with all the highs have come many lows also, from poor hosting, to website malfunctions, and server restrictions. These are things that Jonathan and I have struggled through and have tried to fix as fast as possible.
As most of you know we recently updated our hosting to a VPS which has allowed the site to run much more efficiently and actually work most of the time, it was very graciously donated to us by Alex of Metalix.co.nz but with a more reliable server with more power and memory unfortunately came restrictions on bandwidth, which is the new issue we are facing now.
Moving forward we will begin limiting downloads. This will go into effect tonight 11-11-11.
Trust me when I say this is something I wish we could avoid, but I don’t see a way for this to happen with the current way the site is set up. So what exactly does this mean? We will start breaking users into groups and each group will have a certain amount of bandwidth they are allowed to use per week, until we can find either a better solution or a permanent solution for bandwidth.
Unregistered users and Registered users not sharing blends:
If you have not registered an account on Blend Swap, or have an account but haven’t shared any models you will have 100mb of downloads a week.
Registered Users sharing blends:
You will have the base of 100mb a week of downloads, you will also receive 5mb a week extra for each approved blend you share, up to 10 blends.
For a grand max of 150mb a week for those who have shared 10 blends or more.
Download limits run Monday to Sunday then reset, if you don’t use your mb they do not rollover into the next week, this would defeat the purpose of trying to bring down bandwidth.
Because bandwidth is based on your sharing there will be a much more stringent approval process on models allowed on the site, we don’t want a flood of crap models just so users can get more mb per week.
A new button will be added to the site as seen here, this will tell you how much memory you have, and how much you have left.
I know that there will probably be a lot of you that find this very disturbing, unacceptable, maybe even shady. Trust me when I say Jonathan and I have thought about this in depth, and we can see no other way of offering this site for free, without having some type of limitations on downloads, the site has just gotten to big to sustain itself so measures must be put in place to assure the site will still be around as it grows and so we still may be able to serve you with the great work so many have shared with all of us.
The survey we ran a couple of months ago showed that over 70% of the users surveyed said they download somewhere between 0-5 models a week, that along with the fact that 90% of our models are under 10mb so for most of you these restrictions should not effect how you use the site. However, if you have ideas, suggestions, comments, questions, or want to tell us how stupid this is, we want to hear about it in the comments. This site was created for you guys, we are open to all ideas and suggestions.
We are at this point because we could not find a better way to keep the site alive as it grows and still offer it for free. Hopefully one of you will have a better idea.
As always thank you all for helping make Blend Swap what it is today and helping make it what it will be in the future.
We look forward to your insights on this issue.
The Blend Swap Team
matthew/mofx
jonathan/savagecode
Downloading "Blend Swap Download Changes"
This blend is licensed:
Are you OK with this license?
101 Comments in 7 pages
Mike if we had the money to offer the downloads from S3 we would just by more bandwidth on our server. We don’t even have the capital to afford our server, luckily that was donated to us for free. So I don’t see how adding another option that cost money that we don’t have help our situation. Sorry if that sounds harsh, I’m sick and cranky.
Thanks
@Andrew
For the fun of it, I did some tests with this model (http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/clothes/picnic-cloth/). Picked because the admins say that 90% of models are under 10 MB thus this one is probably about average.
Uncompressed the files total 9.02 MB
The original .rar is 5.39 MB
A .zip compressed with 7zip using “Ultra” compression and the Deflate algorithm is 6.80 MB
A .7z compressed with 7zip using “Ultra” compression and the LZMA algorithm is 5.27 MB
.7z saves 130 kB over .rar and 1,570 kB over .zip
Averaging 5 models/day for a month you would save ~19 MB over .rar and ~230 MB over .zip assuming users’ download patterns don’t change.
Ultimately, however, these meager savings will be wiped out by users’ ability to download a slightly larger number of models. You won’t really be saving anything. In fact you may spend a bit more because the site will be serving more web pages as users look at more blends. So in the end you don’t save very much, if at all. Then there is the added matter that, despite its benefits, most users are unaware of the .7z format, which, as SavageCode suggests, would cause a flurry of “How the $%@ do I open this!?!” comments from uninitiated users. Could this be remidied by an FAQ entry, probably, but how many of us *actually* read FAQs. Also, if as few uploaders as user know about .7z then the actual file reduction will be much less.
@Matthew
I think Mike was suggesting BlendSwap do something similar and sell (or host) models on Amazon.
@Atlantisbase, thanks for doing that leg work. I think you are correct in your explanation of the process and what would happen.
cheers
You’re welcome
I give back in my own way.
Of course the assumptions about the influx of new models is probably a bit off and this says nothing about blends larger than 10 MB, but it’s probably a good estimate.
Have you considered using a service like Cloudflare? It will make the site load faster and save bandwidth.
@BM, we are currently running Clouflare, seems to be helping but wouldn’t solve our bandwidth issue if we ran downloads full open like before. But it’s a nice service and I think we will keep using it.
Thanks
I don’t know where else to post this, but the new download limit seems to break every sunday (the reset day) and tells me I’ve hit my quota even when I haven’t downloaded anything during the week. Effectively making it “No Download Sunday”. Anyone else getting this problem? I’m running firefox 8.
It’s not broken, it’s just because of the timing of the reset, it resets upong landing on the site, but the next page you visit should show the correct value. I will try to fix this problem soon, hopefully next week you guys won’t have this landing page issue.
Let me mention it once more: This is a great site. A main part of its greatness is that it is free. I believe this is important for all hobbyist and semi professional blenderes.
I’ve not read through all the comments above but I have two suggestions:
1. I fully support the setup of a limited download for unregistered users and a bit larger limit for registered users. However there might be a segment of registered users that might be willing to pay something to get unlimited (or a much higher limit) download. However I have no notion of what the cost should be to keep the service up.
2. Sharing blends should only be one criteria to limit the download limit (albeit the dominating one). If other criteria like rating and commenting influence the limit as well we might also see more participation in these section. This however has two drawbacks:
- Rating and commenting is not reviewed by the admins, so there are no limits
- To alleviate the above issue, a solution would be that only ratings and comments on blends that where downloaded count, which would increase the complexity.
All around I must say that I can live well with the current solution.
Hotzst, I completely agree with your statement, I think you will see something like this in the new version of Blendswap. Still working out some ideas though. So no promises.
Earning bandwidth by uploading models… seems fairly ironic, since more models on the site (and thus more downloads) mean more server usage. Of course, I can see why you did that. More models equals more visitors, and advertisers pay for visitors… but still.