Small Change - User Accounts Requierd To Download

[Jeff Tirey]

For Textkit's library of PDFs, I have required user registration and login. The login system is through the Wordpress platform. The day is coming where we will migrate our current forum under PHPBB to wordpress BB but not until both wordpress and wordpressBB can share a common user management system - right now they don't.

I put the files behind a user login because too many bots were downloading the files and since Textkit's files are now on Rackspace's Content Delivery Network, I need to prevent that. I actually don't mind bots. Bots are good - most of the time. After the change, daily bandwidth went down from 7GB to about .5 GB. A sizable difference. At the rate of 7GB a day, that worked out to about $375 a year in unneeded cost. At .5, it's quite fine and more than covered by Textkit's ads running in the forum. I initially thought my bandwidth consumption on natural traffic was less than that, but half a gig a day looks to be what it's at. I wrote a blog about this showing a cost of about $4 a year on the CDN, and it's looking more like $28 or so which I can live with and it's WAY better than 7 or 8 years ago.

So that's why the change was made. What's fun however is to see all the accounts pour in. Right now I'm seeing about 200 new user accounts a day and at least now with a registration we can think about some ways to reach back at this audience for further engagement.

thanks
Jeff

[Bedell]

Thanks for all your time and hard work, Jeff. If you ever put up a 'donate' button, be assured of my 5 Euros!

Sean

[Jeff Tirey]

bummer - I don't have my support page anymore with the new template

I'm talking more about technical details, costs and such only to share in case there are others here at Textkit that want to do online education projects themselves but are unsure of the costs. I have been at this over 10 years and in my 'day job' I do a lot of marketing and technical work around colocation/cloud servers/conversion tracking/phone call tracking. I'm a founding partner at this company here: http://www.mongoosemetrics.com

For Textkit, advertising is way, WAY down but it still covers the costs of a 512MB server and the storage/transfer costs. It's only about $350 a year total and the ads take care of that with a little bit to spare.

I would like to put a donate button up however just to do some fun things we use to do in the past like Ides Of March contests for Amazon.com book gifts.

Thanks again!
jeff

[helios]

I put the files behind a user login because too many bots were downloading the files...

The bots can read Greek?

If they are that advanced, I'd like one to regularly clean my house.