Twin Sisters Blossom [English], by Akino Sora

I've read a lot of forums, and I can tell you the market is in a GIGANTIC turmoil.

Before that, the market was made of GIANTS like filesonic, hotfile and megaupload, very rare big players like depositfiles or fileserve… and that's all, the small players did exist but nobody noticed them.

And then the giants closed down. And the two thirds of the big players cowered out.

Letting all the pressure (not only pressure from the leechers, from the uploaders too) suddenly turn to the previously invisible small players. This was -and is still – madness. I've read reports of file hosts investing in 10 000 US$ of hardware, only to see their capacity once again maxxed and their service become sluggish again less than 24 hours later their new hardware was set up.
See what I mean ?

I know it sucks, but we have no choice but allow the small players to grow big once again.

That said, i'm also working on having my OWN file hosting. This way, even when all the other mirrors die, I'd still be providing at least one last mirror.

I'm trying to find a way to make it work even for free members, but at the moment (hentairules is already on a dedi, so I can monitor detailed stuff), even if I was setting up a brand new dedi just for the file host, free downloads would result in the server, like, exploding, and my costs never being covered.
At the moment, I only see financial viability (sorry but i'm not ruining myself over this) in a system where only paying members (a small fee like 7-8$ – meaning 4-5$ are left after the various fees – per month) have access to the downloads.
I'm regularly working on finding a way to do it right, sooner or later I'll offer that option. With free downloads if I can make it work without making it a financial suicide, otherwise in a "premium member downloading only" perspective.

At this point, I'm pretty much clear about the options :
– an official looking filehost, like the ones I'm using. But I'm the only uploader, and only me can upload. Advantage : it would allow non-adult payment processors. Scripts like this are for sale, for a price below 200$.
– a restricted to members only section with zip files downloadable from there. Much simpler (actually, protecting a directory with a sort of ecommerce-pay-or-fail-to-leech solution), however restricted to credit card processors accepting adult (they aren't many, and they have higher fees, as far as 16% for the best of them, sadly), and paypal would be out of bounds. The initial price would be a bit higher.
– the server to host it : either around 70€ for a hardware-wise dedi with unlimited bandwidth, however crippled by a 100 MB only connexion, or else a twice more expensive dedi with less good hardware, and big but not unlimited bandwidth usage (with the risk to consume more than that !), however with a 1GB line