Po' mans akamai

May 18, 2004 11:28 AM

Welcome to FreeCacheGot a huge media file you want to link to but are afraid you'll kill the user's bandwidth? The Internet Archive currently has Freecache in beta which provides free edge serving for the rest of us.
posted by bitdamaged (6 comments total)

The slashdot folks seem to miss the point, which is that this is for mitigating the bandwidth suckage of single large files, not mirroring entire sites with full functionality. Looks sweet to me.
posted by scarabic at 11:49 AM on May 18, 2004

I've used freecache a few times, but it's been unreliable. Half the time it just timed out, and didn't serve the content. When it did work, it worked fine.
posted by MiG at 12:05 PM on May 18, 2004

www.yousendit.com hosts files up to a gig for a week. I've not had any trouble with it,
posted by Swandive at 1:37 PM on May 18, 2004

Hasn't BitTorrent already more-or-less solved this problem?
posted by reklaw at 3:42 PM on May 18, 2004

reklaw - this is a million percent easier than setting up a torrent, and is also ideal for people who have hosting with permissions with which they can host a file, but not the more involved step of serving a torrent.
posted by kavasa at 4:05 PM on May 18, 2004

I've never found it to be unreliable MiG - one thing you have to be aware of is that it doesn't cache the file until it becomes popular - after 5 requests I think. Up until that point, it just redirects you to the original source, and if the original source is being thrashed, then it's likely it will time out or be very slow.
posted by Jimbob at 5:11 PM on May 18, 2004