Home | Most popular files | Search Mythica will be shutting down at the end of February. After that time, all files on useruploads.mythica.org will cease to be available for download. This wasn't an easy decision to make, but basically what it comes down to is that I no longer have the time, the interest, or the money to keep Mythica running. Assuming that everything is running smoothly, it takes fifteen to twenty hours per week of my time to run useruploads; if something goes wrong, it can be substantially more than that. That's just more time than I have available. In addition, running Mythica is fairly expensive -- the server and bandwidth that are required to host mythica cost a combined total of about $1,100 per month. In the past, that cost has been paid by advertising revenue from useruploads' advertisements. Lately, though, that's not been the case, and I cannot afford to continue making those payments. So, in any case, Mythica will be shutting down at the end of the month. The files.mythica.org portion of the site, which hosts files for High Impact Halo, halo.bungie.org, High Speed Halo and others, will continue to be available for the time being thanks to Louis Wu over at halo.bungie.org, who has graciously agreed to mirror all of the files on that portion of the site. Useruploads, however, which is the bulk of Mythica.org, will be shut down and those files will no longer be available. There's simply no easy way to continue to host them -- there are about 1.5 terabytes of files on useruploads, and hosting them all requires 12-15 terabytes per month of bandwidth. If you're curious, here is some information and statistics about the life of Mythica.org. The site first came online as a filehosting site in January of 2002, shortly after Halo was released. Since then, the site has transferred a total of roughly 500 terabytes of data. Useruploads came online in November of 2004, and since then it has received over 130,000 uploaded files comprising over three terabytes of data. Useruploads has received almost 20 million downloads. Thanks to everyone who's used the site over the past six years. (posted 1/21/2008) Update 1/24/2008: I've received dozens and dozens e-mails and phone calls so far asking mostly the same questions, so I'm going to address them here. Is there anything I can do to help? What about donations? More ads? I really do appreciate all of the offers of assistance, but I've made my decision at this point and there isn't much that can be done to help anyway. Mythica's ad revenue would need to increase ten-fold to fund the site at this point; no matter how many and what type of ads are displayed, that's just not going to happen. As for donations, there are three problems: first is that accepting donations in the amounts needed to fund mythica would require me to incorporate the site as a non-profit corporation, and that requires far more time than I have to invest. Second is that a long time ago, mythica did have a donation link; over the course of a year it received three donations totaling about $80, and this was at a time when the site received even more traffic than it does now. Third is that, even given sufficient funding, I still don't have the time or the interest required to continue to run the site. Will you let me take over the site? Will you sell the site to me? I'm not willing to sell the site or transfer ownership. Partly this is because I need to maintain control of the mythica.org domain name. I'm not willing to sell it because I'd be profiting from other people's work and I'm not comfortable with that. In addition, there are about 12,000 lines of my own code behind mythica; it's all pretty-well tailored specifically to my own set-up, and none of it would be easy to convert to another server or environment. It's also pretty messy code since I'm not a very good programmer. Will all of the files on useruploads really be gone forever? Some of the content on useruploads is also hosted at other sites like Youtube. A lot of the content is probably still saved on the creator's computer. In those cases, it'll be possible to continue to view the content or at least to make it possible for the content to be viewed again. I've always maintained a local backup copy of everything on the site and I won't be getting rid of the disks that hold that backup, but it won't really be possible to access that data after mythica shuts down. If you really want something that's hosted on mythica, now would be the time to get it. Will you put up a link recommending my site as the official replacement for mythica? Sorry, but I don't know enough about any of the sites that have requested this to make a recommendation. A lot of them seem to be fairly small; there's nothing wrong with that, but over the years I've seen far too many people end up with enormous bandwidth overage charges because they underestimated how much demand their site would generate for some measly Halo videos. I'm not comfortable forwarding that much traffic onto any one site. In all honesty if I had to recommend a site as a replacement I'd probably recommend Youtube. I have a web hosting account with unlimited space and bandwidth! I can host mythica for you! Your unlimited web hosting account is not unlimited. Sorry, but it's not. If you start trying to push the amount of data that mythica pushes, you're going to find your account cancelled. Mythica runs off of a dual Xeon 2.66GHz server with 2GB of RAM, a two terabyte RAID-5 array, and an unmetered 100Mb/sec connection -- all of which are dedicated solely to mythica -- and even that doesn't keep up with demand. (All of those times you notice your downloads slowing down are because the connection is running at 100% capacity.) That's a much beefier server than your web hosting provider has for all of its "unlimited" accounts combined. I've negotiated a very nice deal with my bandwidth provider; in general, to purchase the kind of bandwidth, rackspace, and support services that mythica requires, you're looking at a minimum of $2,000 per month or so. If you're really truly interested in trying to replace mythica, send your web host an e-mail with a link to mythica's bandwidth utilization graphs and ask them how much they'd charge you to use that much bandwidth.