If I have a porgram available on my site and 30 people try to download it at the same time would it cause any problems? How do sites like download.com handle the simultaneous downloads?
they probably have multiple internal servers. Requests are most likely done round robin style to the server with the lightest load. Most likely, 30 people downloading the same file from your site will not cause too many problems. Unless the server is already hitting maximum memory capacity. Consider it the same thing as a large html file, I don't think its much different.
That is assuming you are on a dedicated server. If you have 30 downloads on a shared server, you will likely see problems...if they don't kick you off for excessive bandwidth (depending on the file size of the download). As cheap as you can get good dedicated servers for now, that is definitely the way to go if you have software downloads. I use about 5000 GB per month of bandwidth, spread out across two dedicated servers. Let me know if you need a pointer for a good dedicated server option for this.
another good alternative to try is to have it listed and hosted on download.com (a fee applies) which is very reputable and have your download link in your site forward the request to download.com. you'll get mre exposure too doing it this way since many people visit download.com...
Yeah, I was thinking of that alternative... I might separate a special budget to get my program well ranked at download.com
all you need is a few people to download it. I know when I go to download.com i find which ones are downloaded the most first to see which ones to get.
not a bad amount of transfer mate!! you would either be maxing out 2x 10mbit ports or taking it easy on 2x 100mbit ports to be pushing that amount of traffic on two servers.