New idea is based on the following observation: Since recently many hosting companies are offering plans with monthly bandwidth of 15 or 17 TB, for less than $10 a month. This is much cheaper than what I currently pay to keep the files online. My expenses include: cost of the hard disks and the RAID card, cost of electricity used by the disks, by running the machine 24/7 and by air conditioning in summer. Also the disks are noisy. Also, this way I currently upload only about 150 GB a month - 100 times less than a hosting plan would allow to do (theoretically).
So I signed up for one of those plans. 1.5 TB of storage (enough to save complete 6-men Nalimov collection) and 15 TB of monthly bandwidth. It cost me $7 a month. With this plan I theoretically should be able to distribute the whole complete 6-men Nalimov collection to more than 10 people each month. Though it will take time to upload the files to the hosting.
I'm still not sure it will work as well as advertised, so considering it a test run. Of course I can also use the hosting to host other stuff, like normal web-sites.
Some of the hosting companies offering such plans: HostMonster, bluehost, inmotion, FastDomain, Lunarpages, StartLogic, Webhostingpad. I also saw some offers of unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, which I somehow don't seem to believe.
![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
If one more person will get such plan, together we will have 30 TB of combined bandwidth. 3 people will provide 45 TB, etc... We can host all files each, or we can divide the files and share only part. Uploading only part of the files will make it faster to upload, and take less space on the hosting server, leaving free space for other projects.
I think that still not many people use 6-men tablebases. This is not because people don't need them, but mainly because there is no easy way of getting them. Many people are not familiar with eMule or p2p, and they are afraid to try new things. Providing the EGTB files as simple HTTP download will make the files available to anyone who can use a browser.
![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
This can be also considered as a test project. When a new useful EGTB format will emerge in future (taking terabytes of space
![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
BTW, I know that some people are already sharing some 6-men files on their web-servers. Your efforts are very valuable and attracted many people to this field. What I am talking now is to take organized approach and get all 6-men Nalimov files shared this way. If no one joins I will try to share all files myself. If someone joins than it will be of course easier and faster.
Any comments or discussion is welcome.