Fornax

Bandwidth accounting

Added 2021-11-19 12:58:27 +0000 UTC

Hello lovely Patrons,

I already alluded to this on twitter, but there are going to be some changes in how bandwidth is counted. Currently all subscriptions provide downloaders with high speed downloads and an ad-free experience. Your hotlink bandwidth cap is only used when you link to files directly from the API, but this feature is barely being used. Looking at my bank account, it's evident that this is not working out too well.

With the new system all accounts have a bandwidth cap, equal to the amount of hotlink bandwidth that you currently have. All downloads will be subtracted from this bandwidth cap. When the bandwidth on your account runs out the download speed will be restricted and ads will be enabled (like on the free plan) until more bandwidth becomes available again.

A new toggle will be added to the user settings page where you can choose to share your bandwidth with people who download your files, or if you only want to use your bandwidth cap for files you download yourself. By default bandwidth sharing will be turned on. If you turn the toggle off the ads will be enabled again and speed will be limited. The people downloading your files can choose to use their own bandwidth cap to download the file at higher speeds if they have a pro account.

The bandwidth caps are so high that it will never run out for most people, but if your files use a ton of bandwidth it means that people will still occasionally see ads when downloading your files.

So, to summarize: Soon all bandwidth usage will be compensated, either by advertisers, content providers or the people downloading the content. You can choose who pays. But unless you use an exceptional amount of bandwidth, you won't notice a difference :-)