Does It Pay to be Popular?

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Does It Pay to be Popular?

by Derrick Story
Network Newsletter for 06/03/2003

Dear Readers,

Glenn Fleishman, author of many books including "Real World Adobe GoLive 6," recently tried his hand at providing an electronic version of the book to his readership. Since the download was free, the numbers quickly climbed to 10,000. That's impressive!

Except that he suddenly realized he could be liable for a $15,000 bandwidth bill. Fortunately, he avoided financial disaster. And the experience has proved valuable for Glenn, and for those of us who want to provide free, quality content, but without high serving costs.

What about alternatives such as BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer solutions? Glenn writes about the state of "traditional" bandwidth costs, and then explores emerging P2P options in his article, "It Doesn't Pay to Be Popular."

I think you'll find the article, and the discussion that follows it in the TalkBacks, very illuminating.

Until next week,
Derrick

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Derrick Story
O'Reilly Network Technical Editor
derrick@oreilly.com

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