I couldn't agree more. We need to the community to ask insist on the ability to host our own files. It's obvious why Adobe wants to provide a hosting service (a huge revenue opportunity as illustrated below), but those of us who can host things on our own should have that option. I'm fine with Adobe making a healthy profit on hosting services for those who don't know how to, or don't care to mess around with it, but the pricing, reliability and speed of Adobe's hosting compared to others is simply unacceptable.
Case in point, here's a comparison of Adobe's hosting vs. Amazon's S3, which is one of many viable "cloud" hosting options out there.
Assuming I have a 150MB app, and it is downloaded 5,000 times...
Through Adobe:
- "Free" to store the file.
- $1,500 in download costs (5000 download x $0.30).
Through Amazon's S3:
- $0.02/month to store the file (includes redundancy).
- $89.89 in download costs.
So comparing Adobe's hosting to S3, we get:
- 1666% higher pricing.
- Less (or no) redundancy.
- Considerably less reliability.
- Immensely slower speeds (up and down).
For those interested in pricing out your own apps with S3, here's Amazon's calculator:
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
I'm sure others would swear by other cloud services. I've been happy with S3. In the last 4+ years hosting data there, we've had something like 7 seconds of downtime. It's simply rock solid compared to many hosting solutions, let alone compared to what Adobe is offering.
So please, community, let's make our voices heard and demand we have the option of hosting our own files. The solution Adobe is currently providing is simply not reasonable, as Mike said.
Thanks,
Chris
