Do you run a web site that uses a lot of traffic because of large files available for download? Maybe you’re a band or a shareware developer and your bandwidth costs are going through the roof. Well, the folks at the good ol’ Internet Archive—the same folks that brought us the brilliant Wayback Machine—have a solution: FreeCache (sorry, that’s not FreeCash).
Now, simply by adding “http://freecache.org/” to the front of the absolute URLs in your hrefs, you can direct visitors to a cached version of the file to help offset some of the bandwidth usage for particularly large files. I can imagine this would help greatly for sites that are Slashdotted, in addition to the sites for popular shareware, since often the sites most adversely affected are run by a single person on a shared hosting solution, paid out of pocket.
Good stuff.
Posted in Technology