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Anaytics for self-hosted files
I hope one of you comp sci guys can give me some info about this...
As some of you may know already, I started a Bhangra MP3 Community a few months ago. I love Bhangra and I realized that there was really no central place that Bhangra fans can go to listen to music and get news about the global Bhangra scene. It's been going good so far, the traffic has grown to a consistent 200 visitors/day and theres plenty of room for more.
So here is my problem: One of the main parts of the site is the MP3 singles that we post. So far, I've been using a Pro account at Mediafire.com which is awesome. The speeds are fast and the software is very professional and easy to use. One of the best things about it is that it provides detailed analytics information for each file that I have hosted. Meaning it tells me how many times it has been downloaded, where the downloaders are located, etc. It's nice to know which songs people like and which ones they don't.
The downside is that it costs me $15 month...since I already have plenty of hosting and bandwidth with Netfirms, I don't see a point in paying for more hosting. If I could install some sort of analytics backend to keep track of the files on, I could host the songs on my Netfirms account rather than on Mediafire and save that money. Any suggestions?
As some of you may know already, I started a Bhangra MP3 Community a few months ago. I love Bhangra and I realized that there was really no central place that Bhangra fans can go to listen to music and get news about the global Bhangra scene. It's been going good so far, the traffic has grown to a consistent 200 visitors/day and theres plenty of room for more.
So here is my problem: One of the main parts of the site is the MP3 singles that we post. So far, I've been using a Pro account at Mediafire.com which is awesome. The speeds are fast and the software is very professional and easy to use. One of the best things about it is that it provides detailed analytics information for each file that I have hosted. Meaning it tells me how many times it has been downloaded, where the downloaders are located, etc. It's nice to know which songs people like and which ones they don't.
The downside is that it costs me $15 month...since I already have plenty of hosting and bandwidth with Netfirms, I don't see a point in paying for more hosting. If I could install some sort of analytics backend to keep track of the files on, I could host the songs on my Netfirms account rather than on Mediafire and save that money. Any suggestions?
Comments
Linking to off-site files is more of a gray area, and it's easier to separate your legal web community from your illegal file downloads.
Also, as I found out last summer, if you host mp3's on your site, those links will get spread around the internets and you'll have thousands of people downloading your files every day. They'll just download the mp3 directly without even visiting your site. Meanwhile you'll be going through hundreds of gigs of bandwidth per month.
Example: http://talksfu.sslpowered.com/bhangramp3store/opentape/
The Mediafire Pro account does give me direct links to the files, but they aren't true direct links as they would be if I hosted the file myself (the mediafire link does not end in .mp3)
Example: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?iwhnz2twknc
I really want to get the mixtape format going but I'm kinda stuck where I am...if only I could get the best of both worlds haha
Is there a feature in Google Analytics that provides file statistics as well? That would be so sweet
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55529
usually you'd need a server side stats app for that, yea...