Because of high bandwidth needs and cost, ampfea/sln will no longer provide a free file hosting service. People will have to pay to purchase bandwidth to download files that are hosted on the ampfea server. Another change is that authors will now be able to use ampfea to list a file that is actually hosted elsewhere. In other words, if you have a file on your own server, you will be able to list it at ampfea for downloading directly from your server. People that download your file would NOT have to pay a fee in this case, since ampfea would not incur the bandwidth costs.

Besides the "pay for bandwidth" fees, ampfea will be attempting to raise money in other ways (donations, text ads, etc.). If/when the incoming cash flow is high enough, the "pay for bandwidth" fees could be at least temporarily eliminated.

The guys at ampfea have been tremendously good to us here at EX5Tech over the years. They've been hosting OVER 250 EX5 files, and have served up countless gigabytes of EX5 downloads. All for free.

I made a donation to ampfea a couple of days ago, and I hope that you will consider doing the same (it's especially easy to donate using PayPal). It's time to give a little back for the years of free service and downloads we've been getting. I think it would be great (not to mention "appropriate") to see a strong show of donations from the EX5Tech community. Thanks for your consideration in this matter.

Please visit http://www.ampfea.org/ for additional news and details.

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quote:

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Originally posted by jazzminister:
Sorry to hear that AMPHEA is having problems once again. I sent them some $money; it seems they need a continual inflow as it cost money for server space. Some Q come to mind.
1)How much server space is actually needed?
2)is Brian Cowells org able to help out with space on their server?
3)Could we put all the EX info we have onto serveral cds or a dvd (after culling out the not so great post's such as jazzinisters, and then sell these cds on an as need basis at cost? Then we would just have to deal with minimal bandwidth for new material that EXer want to post.....then eventually put that into a cd etc.
Or are all three options fatally flawed, error at 001010111, as my computer is want to say.......

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Look at the yamaha PSR groups or the Band in a Box Groups (and may be many more)

Some stuff to consider:
- Should Ampfea pay me for (freely) offering my content and work? Since they are demanding money now for downloading my goodies. Although they are not demanding a fee for my copyrights, but only for the bandwith...that leads us to...
- Should I pay for using their storage space?
- Should I get a free access, for offering my goodies?
- What if I'm not happy with the considerations Ampfea took, and I take my stuff away. In long term lots of people will look for a better solution and Ampfea will be less than half what it's worth now. (bandwith problem solved )

The Ampfea system previous version was much
easier to handle. I loved the download facts (xxx downloads, top10,...) The search engine was powerful and in a glance you had found what you were looking for. The new system is very hard to handle.

Maybe we should consider other ways for sharing our work. What about file-sharing? Peer2peer? http://www.furthurnet.com/ http://www.badblue.com/index.htm
If we could find a handy program or system to share our work the bandwith problem would be solved and we could even offer more stuff to eachothers. The p2p chat can help out inproblem casses or search-requests.

Any ideas?

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--- Global Peace in Harmony ---

The way I see it... we all pay a subscription, or get charged on phone bills for accessing the internet, so shouldn't some of that money go in funding independant mp3 sites et cetera?...

After all, if sites such as ampfea didn't exist, there'd be less things on the net, probably resulting in less people accessing the net, which would mean less profit for isp's!

Bring it on!

McCoy

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Yamex5 -
Ditto the last sentence I wrote in response to Jazzminister. Also, you said "monthly charge"... Please read the AMPFEA home page. No one has said anything about a "monthly charge". "Pay for bandwidth" could take many forms, not the least of which is "charge per megabyte" (as opposed to "charge per month").

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Lazystrings -
The bandwidth (not space) needed for the EX files alone at AMPFEA/Samplelibrary was measured in tens of gigabytes per month. Some months, it was well over 100 gigabytes. Yahoo won't let you do that. In addition, Yahoo doesn't give you nearly enough space to hold all the EX files. I don't want to discourage you, though. By all means, if you wish to start a Yahoo group for the purpose of posting some of our files, please do so!

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Godyn -
Regarding your comments/suggestions about ads and other commercial income... You already made that suggestion, and I already answered it, in the following topic:

[URL=http://www.ex5tech.com/ex5ubb_cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=4&t=000547]http://www.ex5tech.com/ex5ubb_cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=4&t=000547[/UR L]

quote:

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They're already putting together other means of income, including text ads.

As far as "pay per click" banner ads go, I can tell you with confidence that ampfea could not raise enough money to pay for their huge bandwidth in this manner alone. While their bandwidth needs are very high, their total visits (relative to the bandwidth) are not. The "bandwidth to visit" ratio is very high. Banner ads only amount to a few pennies per click at best.

Without a steady stream of significant donations (which hasn't happened), or without finding a web host willing to donate the bandwidth, they *have* to go to a paid service model, which is what they're doing.

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Regarding your other comments, and "file sharing"... Again, please read the AMPFEA home page, and my original post above. I'll say it a third time, though...

quote:

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Another change is that authors will now be able to use ampfea to list a file that is actually hosted elsewhere. In other words, if you have a file on your own server, you will be able to list it at ampfea for downloading directly from your server. People that download your file would NOT have to pay a fee in this case, since ampfea would not incur the bandwidth costs.

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This will effectively allow anyone and everyone with web space to do "file sharing".

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I've already said this in my original post above, and in many previous posts, but I'd like to remind everyone once again... AMPFEA/teklab/Samplelibrary has been providing this service for FREE for many YEARS. Literally terabytes of files have been served. I don't know of any other place on the net that has done this. Every one of us has been happy to take advantage of this free service. I think it would be a sign of integrity, and certainly appreciation, if everyone could show a little bit of support.

Thanks.

[ June 08, 2003: Message edited by: Ski ]

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