Finding Mirrors for the evolt Browser Archive?

MartinB asks: "I help out running evolt.org, and one of the things we provide is a comprehensive browser archive, with over 100 different browsers, some in multiple platforms and versions, going right back to Mosaic 0.4. This is both a piece of web history, and a resource that lets developers test their sites on browsers which vendors don't offer for download any more. We have an expensive problem - the browser archive chews through 140GB of bandwidth a month and growing, even though we've throttled the FTP server and restricted the maxclients. How do we find people who provide mirrors like these and get browsers.evolt.org spread across lots of hosts?" If you would like to mirror this valuable net resource, please volunteer here (or drop a line to the original submitter)

Comments

This won't help.

[reaper20]

We have an expensive problem - the browser archive chews through 140GB of bandwidth a month and growing, even though we've throttled the FTP server and restricted the maxclients.

For about the next day or too you can count on that getting a little bit more expensive. :)

I hope they find someone, the archive is pretty useful.

.edu sites

[crow]

Look at where mirrors for things like Linux distributions are found. Many exist at .edu sites. Perhaps you could find a University to help you out.

Charge for the bandwidth

[unitron]

If people came to you and said "How about letting me have a copy of foobrowser 0.x on CD", you might not charge them for the software itself, but you wouldn't feel bad about making them pay for the CD itself, would you? Or for telling them to provide a blank CD-R? Why not set up to collect a Paypal'ed bandwidth fee, or get them to mirror what they download for a few days or over a throttled connection?

Supporting free speech doesn't mean that you're obligated to go into your own pocket to provide everyone with free beer.