As my user count grows, I find that my little shared web host (so-called “unlimited” monthly data transfer) is basically getting DDOSed the day I push an update. It also is just a single server instead of a CDN so it’s less than ideal for international users.
What service are you all using to host your software and its updates? I’d prefer static links rather than doing a whole handshake/temp-link thing. Also would like not to go broke paying for storage and transfer fees.
Thanks in advance.
I use Bunny (https://bunny.net) which costs me between 2 and 5$ a month depending on usage.
I also use bunny and believe this is the right answer, but for the sake of argument, let me throw another idea out there.
You’re not the first with this problem, and many auto update frameworks will stagger the release. This is especially important for extremely popular downloads, such as iOS updates. How it works is on install (or first launch) you pick a day of the week at random, and only do your automatic update checks once per week on that day. Or you could pick a number of hours to wait after seeing an update is available and actually downloading it.
But I don’t bother. Bunny can easily keep up with the 2TB per month of traffic I send their way.
Good thought @Thom_McGrath, thanks for that, and thanks to both you and @Beatrix_Willius for the suggestion. So far they look great!
My main application scrapes data from websites, so I push updates when those websites change their structure. If the user doesn’t have the latest version every time they use the software, there’s a good chance the software will not function as intended. So staggered updates are a great idea but not for this particular application.
On my long-term to-do list is implementing Xojoscript for the parsing logic, that way I can just push tiny textfile definition updates, and that would put staggered binary updates back on the table.
Appreciate the replies!
What a great topic and thanks for creating it Christian.
So questions to @Beatrix_Willius, @Thom_McGrath and others. For those using Bunny, why did you choose it instead of just going with the CDN with your hosting provider? Is due to Bunny’s fairly low price?
I’m currently using Digital Ocean Spaces which is sort of an AWS S3/CloudFront product for $5 a month for 1 TiB outbound.
Object storage (s3 and equivalent) is NOT a CDN. It has a bucket at a data center in a specific region. A CDN such as Bunny replicates your file storage around the world, in as many or as few data centers as you desire. So when somebody from Australia downloads my app, they aren’t downloading from New York, they download from Sydney.
Yes, agreed about the S3/CDN side, but alas Digital Ocean’s Spaces is a hybrid that is S3 plus CDN across 200+ geographic locations. So in the end sounds like it semi-equivalent to Bunny. Ultimately by question wasn’t on the S3 side but more the CDN side.
Maybe a better way of phrasing my original question is…
If your hosting provider has a CDN service, why aren’t you using it and instead using Bunny?
Because at the time, Vultr did not offer a CDN. Plus, there’s something to be said about a company whose focus is the task at hand, instead of the “we might as well offer this too” option. Bunny’s focus is a great CDN. That’s the core business. Your hosting provider’s core business is not their CDN, so you’ll almost never get the same level of features.
Ah makes sense and many thanks.
DO here and use Lifeboat to maintain the instance.