by Steve on Thu Aug 16, 2007 10:31 pm
They probably employ a method of load sharing to allow each file to only download at a specific rate. If you therefore download more than one file at a time the speed does not drop per file, but you actually end up with double to the speed overall.
This is good practice and for a site with such a large download repetoir it makes perfect sense. Not employing such a method would mean that those with the fastest connections or who are closer geographically to the server would enjoy extremely fast downloads while those further away or on not such speedy lines would receive horrendously slow rates.
I think that a little courtesy should be employed for 21st Sextury sites due to the fact that they do offer a gigantic archive of material and charge in comparison very little.
I do feel that they probably have too many sites really to maintain successfully and this is apparent with the downtime experienced but overall for what they offer they do a fine job.
Consider for a moment they complexity of such a site. Hundreds of long movie clips, hundreds of thousands of photos, the need to track each one for legal reasons, the cost of each shoot, the cost of website maintenance and design, the cost of the server, the cost of security combined with the negative facts like excessive p2p and file sharing of their material....
Overall, they do a good job and its unfair to critcise without actually taking those factors into consideration.