Greebrun: YES! So glad you loved it. Thank you.
Baxter: I emailed the tech guy about that issue:
Soundguy@themothership.net. He responded:
Hi Melissa,
I suspect the majority of those complaints are coming from customers in the UK or EU. Ever since the
new anti-porn laws in the UK and the new VAT rules on digital downloads in the EU kicked in on
January 1st, there have been some highly suspicious routing and speed throttling issues on
trans-atlantic connections. UK ISPS are notoriously cheap and under-provisioned anyway, but it has
gotten worse lately. We're just going to have to ride that out for now. If a customer complains to
me, I suggest that they try the download very late at night when their ISP is less likely to be
throttling their overseas connections.
One of the biggest issues with foreign customers is that their LOCAL speeds are many times faster
than most of the US. A lot of countries provide 100 mbps service to consumers, whereas most people
in the US are lucky to get 10-20. Most large players (iTunes, MS, YouTube, C4S) use content
distribution networks which provide caching proxies inside the data centers of literally every major
ISP on earth. In many situations, a customer accessing YouTube is not more than about 20 miles from
the caching server feeding them the file. Smaller systems like ours don't have the scale to afford a
CDN, so all files have to come from our US servers.
A customer in London is 7000 miles away from the file they just bought from our servers in Seattle.
Due to the laws of physics and the speed of light, it's physically impossible for that connection to
be greater than about 5 mbps even on the best day. Unfortunately, the UK/EU gets used to seeing
100mb local connections to sites using CDNs and then complain that the real internet is "slow".
Dataloss and Baxter: I’m sorry you guys are having problems, please email him:
soundguy@themothership.net. I’m sure he’s going to help.
Mauser: Nice to meet you! I am so glad you liked it.
WBfoot: New video with my hooves coming in 5 minutes.
I think they look pretty good. I am optimistic about creating whatever I dream up now that I finally have the hang of making latex molds. Eeeeeee! Exciting.