That’s an average of 10,000 successful downloads every day, since we launched the public area (minus the 4 days of downtime). Is that nice in terms of growth and progress? Is it average? Is it phenomenal? I don’t know. Time will tell.

But I’ll be thankful, and I’ll say, personally I love the current progress. And I KNOW that it won’t be long before we hit 20,000 downloads per day and so on and so forth. For us, it’s a motivating factor. Because it tells us that you guys love us. And that’s all I and Dman need to keep going (apart from your support, of course).

I want to keep this short right now (so I can go on and start preparing our forums, etc for the upcoming changes).

To celebrate the 100,000 downloads milestone, I’ll be creating and giving out 3 Private/Premium accounts. How will they be given out? I’ll include more information by tonight.. or tomorrow!

For now, just enjoy the download experience!

Ignore the flashy title

Not many people read this blog, but those who do, they’ll find this post interesting. The public downloader has been on and off for the past 72 hours (3 days) and the time it’s been on, it has been very unstable. Why?
Lot’s of issues, to be honest. So, I’ll try to explain the entire issue here as quick as I can

When me and Dman first launched RP, we NEVER expected such an explosive response. Counting today (December 5th, 2009) it has only been 9 days since we launched. In that time, we’ve crossed 85,000 successful downloads.
So, back to the story (lol), about 3 days into launch, our server was maxing out the 100mbps connection 24/7. Effectively, we were transferring about 2TB of data every DAY. That’s 2,048 gigabytes!

Our old provider wanted us to pay 6-months upfront to get a port upgrade to 1gbps, but we could not afford that, so we decided to move to another data center that offered a 1gbps port for relatively cheap ($20). We never realized we were making a HUGE mistake. 2 days after moving with them, they started having problems with us moving 2TB of data everyday. Since our bandwidth was limited to only 10TB a month, they were worried we’d cross our limits. To top that, despite having paid for 1gbps, we never got it. We were still limited to 100mbps. And worst of all, their network was slow. Connectivity to at least 80% of our users from their network was seriously slow and yielded only 60% of total speed for most users.

Most free service providers would not care. But I love Google. (If you understood that, you’re one of those people who love the word ‘free’). Besides, if me and Dman are providing a service, we’d rather make sure our users have an optimum experience, as opposed to just dumping ads and trying to make top $$$ off you guys. Nope. That’s not us.

Soooo, yeah. Back to the issues. The new data center quoted us a price of $650/month to get a 1gbps port + 100mbps dedicated unmetered (effectively 66TB bandwidth/month). Nah. We could not afford that. No way!

So we turned back to our old provider, and asked them to help us out. They’re great, to be really honest. For specs and bandwidth, that everyone else in the industry would charge $500-$600 (each month) for, they gave it to us for $400/month
So, we’re back with them. (And yeah, the new data center will not refund us, so that’s $220 gone down. Though we just MIGHT have chances of recovering that amount partially).

And now, we’re waiting for our management company to optimize the server (install a new webserving software and optimize it) before we go live again. Though I’ll try to optimize the current webserver and see if I can get the site up and running again while they optimize it in the background.

That’s about it.
I’ll keep you all updated on the rest of the progress
Cheers,
Hamza

P.S: The private server is unaffected by all of this. So there you are, another advantage of being a private member. (Private memberships not out yet, though. We’ll be announcing them soon)