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I work for a medium sized software company and have been put to the task of finding a new way of electronically distributing our software. We don't have a super fast connection to distribute it ourselves so it would need to be a solution that we can upload to and send out links to customers. The customers won't be purchasing our software from our website as we already do most of our sales from direct sales and partner sales. Since I joined the company we have grown from CD distribution sized downloads to DVD sized distribution downloads. We released a new version and find the YouSendIT Service to be clunky and 99% of our customers receive a link to download the software. We only send out a printed media if requested. Is there a service besides yousendit that allows for unlimited file size uploads/downloads. I have heard of drop.io and it seemed to be similar to yousendit. If you could please point me in the direction of Electronic software distribution system that is 3rd party hosted would be appreciated.
Thanks
Mike
You should look into Content Delivery Networks, such as Amazon CloudFront.
You might want to reconsider the way you are going about this.
If you software is open source, you should be using sourceforge. Otherwise you should just get a cheap hosting plan with lots of transfer bandwidth.
For example, godaddy has an unlimited account (unlimited transfer, unlimited space) for about $14.95 per month.
You point a sub domain i.e. download.rivageek.com to that server. This gives your users confidence when they download your application.
If they have to go to some ad laden 3rd party site they might think twice about giving you money. If you lose only 1 customer to that, it pays for itself (assuming you charge more than 14.95 for your product).
The fine print on many of those 3rd party sites mean they own whatever you upload as well.
If you'd like something that allows (simplisticly) secure one-time downloads, I've used filehosting.org in the past. They give you a hashed link to the software when you upload it, which you can then email to anybody you want to be able to download the file. If you want, you can set it to delete the file after one download.
In response to using your own domain for the downloads, it's possible to configure both Amazon S3 and CloudFront to use a custom domain name. Here are the instructions for S3 -- very straight forward:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html?VirtualHosting.html
If emailing out a direct link to your distribution file (zip, etc.) is sufficient, I'd say go with one of these services -- they're very cost effective, reliable, and easy to set up.
You could use a filehosting service or get a regular web host with unlimited bandwidth just avoid Godaddy as its shared hosting is overcrowded and overbooked. (personal experience)
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I have been doing webdesign for a small business in Denmark, which alrady have a deal with a larger company to create the final site.
Among this companys proposal, I see that they charge a rather large fee for installing Magento on my clients server, and an additional fee to integrate the design.
Same company forbids my client from having FTP or similar access to the server, and they are therefornot able to install this themselves.
My question is : is resale of the Magento really allowed by the licence? This company wants to charge a rather steep amout for even installing a blank version of it, no Magento-licencing included.
Ihave looked larger company up, and this company does NOT have a standing licence for Magento. And even if they got one, I have a sneeky feeling that something is legal/licence wrong here.
The reason I share this with you is that I have a guts feeling that I should raise some critical questions and suggest that My client uses another company for their webaite, but I need to be certain that Im on the right side.
The IT company has no partnership with Magento/Varien, and have a somewhat tarnished reputation already...
I have mailed Magento about this, but have not had any response yet.
Your question is not entirely clear. But a company can certainly charge for installing a licensed product on behalf of the licencee, this is just a consulting or service fee (unless the licence specifically prohibits a third party from doing this, which is possible (although unlikely) if a) source code is being exposed, or b) there are other commercial sensitivities such as NDAs. But then that is not your risk, it's the licensee's)
As for Ubuntu, a company can again charge for installing or maintaining an Ubuntu install, again this is consulting/service. In fact you can SELL a copy of Ubuntu too, if someone is willing to pay for it that is their perogative (and they in turn can sell it themselves). You just have to provide the source and the licence, not just a compiled binary in order to comply with the GPL.
I can understand the position of the 'large company' providing the managed hosting for the Magento build. However, I also understand your concerns.
Assuming that you are only working on the design, there is no reason why you cannot implement your design on localhost with the Magento 'demo store' products. You can then take your design along to the 'small company', get your designs signed off, archive the /skin/frontend/default/macguffin and /app/design/frontend/default/macguffin folders, hand them over to the company providing the 'managed hosting' and then collect your pay-cheque.
By not allowing you access via FTP the 'managed hosting' provider are ensuring that their clients have no third-parties able to access any-of-their-stuff. Furthermore, design is not that big a deal in a Magento build, there is also the payment gateway, the shipping setup, analytics and everything else that happens on go-live. They are also taking the responsibility of providing uptime, availability and the aforementioned security.
You and I know that you can do all of that on a virtual-private-server and get it done in a matter of days, with lots of testing but no client liaison meetings, office overheads to pay for, an expensive project manager to explain everything to, excessive time-sheeting to keep up to date and so on.
However, the 'small company' will have reservations on allowing someone other than the 'large company' doing all of that. Given that their web presence is pivotal to the success of their business, given that they may not have management resources, given the fear of the unknown, given a lack of in-house expertise, politically the solution they have arrived at can be considered as making business sense to them.
There is nothing wrong with the business arrangement from a legal/licensing point of view. From your point of view of getting the job done, you can do your design offline, i.e. on localhost, deliver the deliverables and collect your cheque.
If the deal with the 'large company' does not work out then, if your work is good, you will be well placed to take on the project, to charge 'freelancer' rather than 'agency' rates and build a long term relationship with the 'small company'. However, you are not there yet, your best bet is to forge a close working relationship with the 'small company' and the 'large company'. For all you know, the 'large company' may have other clients, and, if you work well with them (i.e. drop the suspicions and animosity-from-the-outset), then you will possibly get other design work from their other clients.
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It seems that licensing terms would prevent us from using Google Maps API in our software. We would prefer to be absolutely free open source and Google Maps API will require commercial license if our software is sold (correct me if I am wrong - I will delete this question then :-).
So the question is if there are alternative map APIs for GWT?
Openlayers is free software, http://openlayers.org/; it has a GWT plugin here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gwt-openlayers/
As far as Google's License (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html):
10.9 use the Service or Content with any products, systems, or applications
for or in connection with:
(a) real time navigation or route
guidance, including but not limited to
turn-by-turn route guidance that is
synchronized to the position of a
user's sensor-enabled device; (b) any
systems or functions for automatic or
autonomous control of vehicle
behavior; or (c) dispatch, fleet
management, business asset tracking,
or similar enterprise applications
(the Google Maps APIs can be used to
track assets (such as cars, buses or
other vehicles) as long as the
tracking application is made available
to the public without charge. For
example, you may offer a free, public
Maps API Implementation that displays
real-time public transit or other
transportation status information.
If your Maps API Implementation is deployed internally or you are
charging for use of your Maps API
Implementation, please contact the
Google Maps API Premier sales team for
more information);
My advice would be to contact Google and ask them about your specific set of circumstances. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
If you are looking for full open data you might want to check out OpenStreetMap.org they list in their FAQ where they pull their open data from.
I'm not an expert, but a quick google found GWT-Ext, where it looks like they're using OpenStreetMap data which is free to use in a commercial application.
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I went to GoDaddy.com for hosting. They have menus like
1)website hosting
2)grid hosting
what is the difference between the two. I am new to this hosting and webapps stuff..
Grid hosting usually means that the web space you rent is not located on one (potentially shared) machine, but is more like a "virtual machine" (think VMware) which is hosted on a cluster of servers (a grid).
While resources on a single machine are limited and might run out, especially if it's a shared host and you have to share your resources (memory, bandwidth) with potentially hundreds or thousands of other users who are hosted on the same machine as you, grid hosting is more flexible, as your virtual website could leverage resources from more machines in the cluster if necessary. This of course also increases reliability of the website, as the failure of one grid node doesn't matter, another server takes over, while the failure of your dedicated or shared host takes your website offline.
I would assume that they refer to the single machine as "website hosting".
Update
GoDaddy has an FAQ about their grid hosting, which should answer all additional questions you might have.
A reply from Godaddy Support:
Please be advised while there is unlimited compute cycles for site server and not for database.
From wikipedia: Grid Computing | Cloud Computing. I haven't seen 'grid hosting' as a common phrase, but it could be taken to mean using one of the earlier two concepts to host a website in a scalable manner.
However, if godaddy is offering 'grid hosting' I suspect they're offering to grid computing to you in such a way that has nothing to do with hosting a website. They're offering to sell you large amounts of processor power with low communication requirements, as opposed to selling you web hosting which is typically high communication requirements with low processing requirements (relative to one another of course)
Grid computing is a collection of computing resources from multiple locations to reach in a common location. Grid is also called distributed system.it is similar to a VPS but generally has more storage then VPS Servers.
Grid Hosting is a form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.
Currently, various hosting service types are available..you can find details for them from here..
From above these, you can select your desired hosting provider and type.
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I was brainstorming interesting usages of Twitter and came up with the following:
An application can use it as a call home mechanism
An application that has an invalid license could broadcast its location
A software company could use it as a remote shell like interface and issue commands to shutdown, restart and to publish patches
An application can use it for heartbeat purposes
Has anyone else came up with other non-standard usages of Twitter?
I fail to see the advantage of using a proprietary, third-party chat site in place of an appropriate networking protocol.
Matthew nailed the point that all these "applications" just represent a communications protocol between twitterer and remote host, and there are lots of mature protocols you could use instead right out of the box, rather than rolling your own on twitter.
But depending on your situation, of course there could be scenarios in which twitter is the easy way. I have written similar hacks that use e-mail as transport mechanism for automated tasks, simply because corporate red tape doesn't permit us other more conventional means. They can reboot machines, restart processes, post public messages, etc.
One of it is already available for Windows - "TweetMyPC v2.0 lets you shutdown/restart/LogOff and lots more in your windows PC.remotely."
I'm not sure this counts as a very practical use (a bit of fun mainly), but it certainly attracted my interest:
Twitter image encoding challenge
The idea of this challenge is to try to encode a picture into a 140 (Unicode) character Tweet. It's quite astounding how much information some of the algorithms posted there can fit into a message.
Scott Hanselman used Twitter to create an app for ordering a sandwich.
Check out his post
I think the main advantage of using twitter in instances like this is its SMS capabilities (and the fact they're free - whereas you can buy services that charge a monthly fee to allow you to receive SMS messages to a HTTP page or something like that).
I'd considered using it to make a little budget app for myself where I could SMS twitter things I'd bought to a private twitter account, similar for tracking petrol usage I was planning on smsing the odometer reading,cost etc in a certain format and capturing it at home to run statistics and stuff on it. There are limitations to it though - like you can only hook up an SMS number to 1 twitter account...
It's good to think outside the box, but don't be too focused on using just twitter because it's cool.
If you were comfortable setting up sensors and such, you could get a microcontroller, hook it up to a twitter feed, and then give it remote commands.
For instance, remote controlled house lights. You could then just tweet "Home lights on GXSDFXV" (The garbage at the end is to prevent real tweets from turning on and off your lights).
I wouldn't use Twitter in particular for transferring any private information (think about security if someone hacks the account and can shutdown your corporate servers or transfer fake licenses). For that I would setup a private server which implements the open microblogging protocol (like identi.ca) as long as - like others already said - there is another more suitable protocol.
For publishing PUBLIC information (heartbeat messages can be considered that, too) I like the idea pretty much. We recently had a very successfull (but unfortunately effectless) E-Petition in Germany where a Twitter account posted the number of signatures every couple of minutes.
Carsonified are using this to allow people to discover other people sitting in the same room at their conferences.
They label each chair with a tag and then you tweet that tag to an account they have and it registers you on a floorplan on the venue. Users are coloured in on the plan by their interests.
Clever but a bit overcomplicated for my tastes...
http://hello.carsonified.com/Home/Faq
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This is slightly off topic of programming but still has to do with my programming project. I'm writing an app that uses a custom proxy server. I would like to write the server in C# since it would be easier to write and maintain, but I am concerned about the licensing cost of Windows Server + CALS vs a Linux server (obviously, no CALS). There could potentially be many client sites with their own server and 200-500 users at each site.
The proxy will work similar to a content filter. Take returning web pages, process based on the content, and either return the webpage, or redirect to a page on another webserver. There will not be any use of SQL server, user authentication, etc.
Will I need Cals for this? If so, about how much would it cost to setup a Windows Server with proper licensing (per server, in USA)?
This really is an OT question. In any case, there is nothing easier than contacting your local MS distributor. As stackoverflow is by nature an international site, asking a question like that, where the answer is most likely to vary by location (MS license prices really are highly variable and country-specific) is in my opinion not likely to receive an useful answer.
I realize this isn't exactly answering your question but if you want to use Linux, maybe you want to look into using Mono. .Net on Linux.
If users will not be actually connecting to any MS server apps (such as Exchange, SQL Server, etc) and won't be using any OS features directly (i.e. connecting to UNC paths) then all that should be required is the server license for the machine to run the OS. You need Windows Server CALs when clients connect to shares, Exchange CALs for mail clients, and SQL Server CALs for apps that connect to your databases. If the clients of your server won't be connecting to anything but the ports offered by your service, you should be in the clear, and it shouldn't cost any more to build a server for 100 users than 10.
You may not need any CALs for users depending on how you use the server. Certain functionality requires the purchase of CALs but some doesn't. There's no real good way to answer this question since the requirements are too vague. Does it use domain services? Does it use SQL server? Clustering? There are many variables.
If you are looking at what the most you could possibly pay, go to CDW and look at the Open License/Open Business products to get an estimate.
Like said above, if you are using your own connections and nothing else on the server you wont need the cals.
I would Google the ROI on Linux vs Windows for a commercial server, I have no option generally on this, but I have seen that long term they level out, in the grand scheme of things the initial cost of the Windows license is actually minimal and insignificant.
Choose the best technology to solve the end users problem, document why, provide an evaluation report, include maintenance costs, development costs etc. When you do this the answer will be clear to you and your customer.
If your users are not connecting to any other windows resources (Active Directory, SQL Server, File Shares, etc) then you shouldn't need CALs but you I believe there is something like an external connector license. There's also a 'web edition' which looks like it's in the range of ~$400.
Also it looks like Microsoft will be removing the CAL restrictions on web servers completely in Windows Server 2008
Microsoft should call their licensing division Enigma...