February 05, 2007

New limits on Public Files

As part of the changes we have introduced this week we are announcing that free accounts at myDataBus.com will now be limited to 1GB of transfer per day for Public Files. As always there are no limits or quotas affecting transfer of your own files, or files from groups you belong to.

Those of you who have been around for a while know that we introduced public files with a very high limit so that we could evaluate how the public files would be used by our customers (20GB). We hear the groans out there from a few of our power-users, but reasonable limits are of course necessary for the long-term success of our site. We do want to thank you all and soften the blow for those that will be impacted by the new limits-- all of our existing customers will continue to enjoy a limit of 20GB per day for a limited time.

The sliver lining in these changes (you will hear much more about this later!) is that we are nearly finished converting our users to Amazon.com's S3 storage service. This means that your files are actually stored and delivered from Amazon data centers. Why should you care? Because it's fast. Very fast... if your account has been converted and you have a high speed connection you have probably already noticed that files download much faster. It also means that file downloads don't affect the myDataBus.com website, keeping it much more responsive even when a user posts a very popular file!

By way of comparison, our free accounts offer about 30GB per month of transfer for public files (sometimes called 'hosted files' by other services). Most of our competitors offer far less (or none at all!) for their free plans.

We hope you continue to enjoy using myDataBus.com, and we continue to welcome your feedback about our service!