Hello,

Thank you for visiting this site. I launched this site back in July (the 4 month anniversary is today!) and I have received a response that exceeded my expectations. There are people who come to this site whom I now communicate with on a near daily basis. People come here from all over the world to share their love of film, technology, audio, etc. I have learned a lot over the past four months and I am sure the next 4 months will be just as exciting.

Background

I want to give you a bit of information as to where things stand in terms of the current infrastructure. Thedigitaltheater.com is currently on a shared hosting platform that has a 20GB storage allocation, and unlimited bandwidth (the amount of data visitors can download). That 20GB allocation is 97% full. The 20GB consists primarily of .mp4 files with AC3 audio. When I started this site, that was my focus since one of my frustrations was being able to obtain trailers or demo files that would play on the PS3. I am do not want to move away from that.

To supplement the 20GB of storage space, I am using a free account at mega.nz that has 50GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth. This works really well, and I am able to put larger files, such as .mkv with DTS-HD MA, or LPCM lossless audio tracks, and those .iso files that the 3D folks love so much. I would like to thank “Rugal2” for uploading those .iso files to movie list.

The Issue

However, an issue has come up. I was informed by mega.nz that they soon (the email said Dec 2015) will be enforcing bandwidth limitations. For a free 50GB account, the monthly transfer quota will be 10GB. Seeing that the average file size of those higher quality files are around 350MB (some are as high as 875MB) you can easily see that 10GB will be used by downloading a handfull of trailers – about 29 on average. In reality, we had over 5000 in the past month, which is about 1.75 TB. Clearly, 10GB is not going to do it.

That is the issue we are currently facing. We have unlimited bandwidth, but only 20GB of storage, and 50GB of storage with what will soon be 10GB of bandwidth. Additionally, to upgrade my hosting plan to get more than 50GB of storage will result in a 5TB bandwidth cap. In the past month, between our domain and mega.nz the bandwidth has totaled to 4.45 TB, that does not leave us any room for growth. The paid service at mega.nz will cost 30 Euros a month to handle the current transfer amount.

I looked into some cloud storage such as google drive and Amazon Web Services. While storage space is dirt cheap, the bandwidth rates are not. Amazon Web Services charges $0.09 per GB up to 10TB. The 4.45 TB downloaded last month would cost me $400.50 US. That is not an option. I also looked into some Virtual Private Servers, which would theoretically increase performance and download speeds, many of the reviews for the providers that offered unlimited bandwidth were not very positive. Additionally, their unlimited policy included clauses to say that it did not apply to websites that made their content available to the public – for free or paid. I think that rules me out since everything here is freely available to anyone who wants to download it.

If you know of a hosting provider that would provide large amount of storage and unlimited bandwidth, and is good at what they do, please let me know.

Next Steps

I am going to migrate the files from mega.nz to a new data transfer provider. I have found a place that will allow 100GB of storage, and unlimited bandwidth!

To improve the overall site performance, I am going to upgrade the hosting plan to get us on a faster server with less traffic, as well as a bit more storage for the .mp4 files which are the foundation of the site. In order for data transfer provider to meet our needs of hosting those lossless .mkv and .iso files it will cost $120 US for 1 year. I am respectfully asking for some help with this cost. If this is a service that you enjoy and would like to make a donation to keep it going – you can make a donation here using paypal. If you do not want to donate, you can also help support this site by making a purchase through one of the Amazon links. It does not matter what you buy, as long as the transaction is initiated from one of the links, I will get a 4% commission. If you are planning on making a purchase using Amazon, I would appreciate if you accessed Amazon from a link on this site.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to Go Shopping!

I will provide updates on the progress, and I would certainly like to have enough raised to begin storing files at the new location before the bandwidth limits are in place. Looking to the future, as this site grows I will need to look at other hosting options. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear it.

Thank you for your support.

Jonathan

PS. There are a lot of highly anticipated trailers coming soon, including:

Captain America: Civil War
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Rogue One at starwars.com)
Star Trek Beyond
X-Men: Apocalypse
Independence Day: Resurgence
Suicide Squad
Ghostbusters
and more…