What service do you use to distribute software?

Question

I work for a medium sized software company and have been put to the task of finding a new way of electronically distributing our software. We don't have a super fast connection to distribute it ourselves so it would need to be a solution that we can upload to and send out links to customers. The customers won't be purchasing our software from our website as we already do most of our sales from direct sales and partner sales. Since I joined the company we have grown from CD distribution sized downloads to DVD sized distribution downloads. We released a new version and find the YouSendIT Service to be clunky and 99% of our customers receive a link to download the software. We only send out a printed media if requested. Is there a service besides yousendit that allows for unlimited file size uploads/downloads. I have heard of drop.io and it seemed to be similar to yousendit. If you could please point me in the direction of Electronic software distribution system that is 3rd party hosted would be appreciated.

Thanks

Mike

Answer 1

If you'd like something that allows (simplisticly) secure one-time downloads, I've used filehosting.org in the past. They give you a hashed link to the software when you upload it, which you can then email to anybody you want to be able to download the file. If you want, you can set it to delete the file after one download.

Answer 2

You might want to reconsider the way you are going about this.

If you software is open source, you should be using sourceforge. Otherwise you should just get a cheap hosting plan with lots of transfer bandwidth.

For example, godaddy has an unlimited account (unlimited transfer, unlimited space) for about $14.95 per month.

You point a sub domain i.e. download.rivageek.com to that server. This gives your users confidence when they download your application.

If they have to go to some ad laden 3rd party site they might think twice about giving you money. If you lose only 1 customer to that, it pays for itself (assuming you charge more than 14.95 for your product).

The fine print on many of those 3rd party sites mean they own whatever you upload as well.

Answer 3

You should look into Content Delivery Networks, such as Amazon CloudFront.

Answer 4

In response to using your own domain for the downloads, it's possible to configure both Amazon S3 and CloudFront to use a custom domain name. Here are the instructions for S3 -- very straight forward:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html?VirtualHosting.html

If emailing out a direct link to your distribution file (zip, etc.) is sufficient, I'd say go with one of these services -- they're very cost effective, reliable, and easy to set up.