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For you, perhaps. But it's a hugely popular site with tons of traffic within the top 300 sites in the world.



So is stuff like CNET Download.com which is spewing tons of toxic software over the world. The masses don't care where you're hosting, they just want their download. If those projects on SourceForge moved their traffic would implode overnight.

Nobody goes to SourceForge for SourceForge.


For quite a few of us, there's no one offering the services SourceForge does. PortableApps.com hosts over 300 separate apps packaged for portability. All of the open source ones are hosted on SourceForge except the ones hosted by the publishers themselves. All are accessible via browser and via direct download with wget/curl/etc so our users can download and update automatically using our platform. github et al aren't really designed for that type of setup. If we move off SourceForge, we'll have to self-host and figure out a way to cover the expense of that.


> For quite a few of us, there's no one offering the services SourceForge does.

Garbage. Not even close to true. It may be inconvenient to use other hosting systems but this is 2016 and there's an embarrassment of alternatives to SourceForge. It might require bolting a few different systems together to make it work, but it's doable.

> If we move off SourceForge, we'll have to self-host and figure out a way to cover the expense of that.

GitHub offers a lot of free hosting, including downloads, but it's a little trickier to use than SourceForge. There's also very inexpensive hosting via other providers where bandwidth is very cheap to free, and many offer steep discounts for open-source projects.

I'm dismayed the community put up with SourceForge as long as it did.

Where's the open-source SourceForge alternative? That's what we need. Even if SourceForge does clean up its act, nobody should be held hostage there. Same goes for GitHub or any other "mission critical" service. Too big to fail is a problem.


Please let me know of a free hosting service that will:

- allow us to host hundreds of apps totaling 100s of GBs

- handle millions of downloads totaling multiple TBs per month

- allow downloads via browser and direct connection via wget/curl/windows networking components

- provide public stats of said downloads

- allow us to store dozens of versions of each app that will see fewer downloads dating back 10 years

- allow me to upload the thousands of files we have on SourceForge via FTP/SFTP just separated in sub-directories by app without using a clunky web interface or requiring me to manually create multiple entries via a clunky web ui before uploading

- be open source like SourceForge is

- be around for at least another 5 years (preferably longer) and has been around for at least 5 (preferably 10)

- not require me to manage another server box, ideally

There are a ton of free hosting options. Most of them are rather terrible. The smaller ones can't handle the amount of bandwidth we push on their "free" tier. Many of them are startups that crash and burn within a year or two. The larger, more reliable hosting providers aren't interested. I've asked.

Github isn't designed for this type of download hosting setup (it's really designed for libraries with really basic app downloading as a recent addition). Plus github is closed source, which isn't a dealbreaker but is less than ideal. And getting thousands of files for download across 100s of apps (separate repositories) would be prohibitive time-wise.


You'd have to see tens of thousands of projects move all at once to see traffic implode "overnight"


Remember Geocities? How about MySpace?

What about Google Code? Freshmeat?

Overnight is not a literal thing, but one day the site's there, and the next? Nothing.




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