I am looking for feedback on ways to host CD images cheaply. I currently am sending out apx 20 sets of 4 CDs per month, sometimes internationally. This amounts to about $40 US, plus the packaging and labeling, and my time. For a non-profit, that is significant. I’d like to make the ISO images available online, for the few of my customers who would want to take the time to download them.
The problem is that the cost seems enormous compared to what I’m spending now. Each 4-CD set would amount to apx 3gigs of storage and transfer, and I have no way of telling how many would actually be downloaded. It could be low since many people don’t have the patience to wait that long. Conversely, I get periodic large spikes of activity on the website where individual files are hosted.
I considered bittorrent, but I think that requires that a download be fairly popular, or it just won’t work well. Also, most of my customers barely understand what an MP3 is, so getting them to even consider bittorrent is a stretch. I also considered just hosting them off a home server via my Comcast link, but I figured I could lose my account that way when my uploads suddenly spike.
Perhaps I missed something in my searching for a host. If anyone has ideas, I’d like to hear them.