My monthly download has exceeded 20Gb for the first time. I'm having to pay £2 for every extra Gb above 18Gb so it's starting to get costly. I need some ideas for reducing the download amounts without making things more complicated and confusing for my visitors.
With my main programs I bundle the .Net runtime. This makes them twice as big as they need to be. I could offer smaller downloads which download the .Net runtime separately if it is needed when installing on a PC. I'd still carry on providing the big downloads though as testing has shown they are less confusing for people.
An alternative might be to host the downloadables on a different server, e.g. I have a second hosting account with HostGator and they have essentially unlimited download quotas. Would this be confusing or lead to mistrust though if people see they are downloading from a different site? One thing I could do I suppose is host sliqtools.com on HostGator so people see the download from sliqtools.com (not .co.uk) which might be more understandable from their point of view.
by ML
My first thought is £2 that big a deal ?
ReplyDeleteHowever, you could do a check on the browsers user agent string to see if they have dotnet installed and present different downloads.
To be honest I've been through the grinder over the years over dotnet MDBSecure and Kids Mask Factory (although named Kids Mask Print at the time) both started out as dotnet. Ideaspad still is.
I re-wrote them in RealBasic because of the DotNet download.
However these days dotnet is more available with broadband.
So I'd say remove dotnet and don't worry. Do a check in your installer and make it nice and simple for them to download it.
I think these days people are prepared to download updates, if you say something like, your PC requires some new files to make invoice prog to run, and don't mention dotnet or don't confuse people if you do, then it should be OK.
Typically in my case my rewrites were completed and dotnet because less of a problem.
Ideaspad seems to be my most popular program I think, for its SEO placement anyway.
I take your point about £2 not being much. It bugs me a bit though that I'm now paying £16 a month more than I was 6 months ago and it's likely to go higher. My host is very fast but quite pricey. In the US, unlimited bandwidth has been the norm for some time. In the UK it's becoming more common but I don't fancy switching hosts.
ReplyDeleteOn the .Net side, the dev. technology is a big advantage and packaging the runtime makes support a whole lot easier. People don't install on the same PC they download to a lot of the time and some people have enough trouble transferring files from 1 PC to another anyway. I'm coming across a number of people who like to work on a standalone/ non-internet PC (away from viruses and so on).
It's a trade off between bulking the size of the download and reducing the support overhead. On a number of occasions I've had to guide people through copying files from 1 PC to another using a USB flash drive. I don't want to throw .Net into the mix too.
TimePunch is also a .NET product and I don't bundle the .NET Runtime. This has mainly three reasons. First, because it's multiple big than my software. Second, because you can't bundle all languages and versions. Let me explain. The runtime of .NET is localized. That means, that german would install a german runtime, french people a french runtime and so on. Third, the .NET runtime is such common, that most people already have installed it. For the few, who haven't, I wrote a FAQ with Pre-Requisites that tells that you have to install the runtime. That's complete sufficient I think.
ReplyDeleteGood points. However .Net 2.0 is not widely present on user's PCs. I don't have any language issues as I'm only interested in English-speaking markets!
ReplyDelete