Since 2013, our paid download service has been strictly set to $1 per download and we have kept that unchanged. Initially our payment gateway only supported USD. Times have changed, as has the popularity of our mod and the infrastructure we are hosting it on, therefore we have now changed the currency to EUR.
Why is the Euro a better option for us today?
- the vast majority of ProMods users are European
- the Euro is a leading worldwide currency and still gaining popularity
- our payment gateway partners now finally support Euro payments
- all of our infrastructure and server hosting bills are paid in Euro
- PayPal takes a big chunk in fees for every Dollar exchanged to Euro
We are aware that changing the currency increases the price slightly, but we believe this shouldn’t be a major issue for our loyal fans. There is no plan to increase or change our pricing further, any time in the future. The main pack is set to €1 and the TCP to €0.50.
While our funds will increase slightly we can spend more money on our core infrastructure, amongst which the free download servers. Thanks to this change we can now offer a 50% speed increase on the free servers, to 300kb/s. The maximum amount of concurrent downloads remains set to two.
About our server infrastructure
Maybe you wonder what your €1 contribution means to us? Well, we use it to keep our infrastructure running and we cover our software licenses to keep expanding the mod.
Our main front-end systems run on on a network of servers hosted by Linode in Frankfurt and New York, and they are cached in the cloud globally by CloudFlare. They include two web servers that host the forum and the blog, a database server and a development server for the production environment of ProMods.
Paid downloads are hosted on servers provided by Amazon S3 and cached worldwide, through our partner Payloadz.
Free downloads are hosted on servers provided by Scaleway in Paris and Amsterdam. We scale these servers based on demand, and we typically use at least four to cope with a new release launch.
When we started in 2013 we hosted the mod on a simple file-sharing site, but it was enough to crash the website instantly. We had never imagined in our wildest dreams that our project would grow this big. On average ProMods generates a whopping 100TB of data traffic every month. Enough to get us lifetime bans on popular file-hosting sites.
Each month, the combined websites serve almost 40 million requests and despite DDoS protection, there are still 50,000 attempts to attack our site.
As you can see, these systems require money to keep ticking. Your contribution helps us paying for these servers and delivering our mod.
Alternative payment options
We often get questions about alternative payments by members “not wanting a PayPal account”.
First of all; you can use a credit card without logging into PayPal and creating an account.
If you do have an account but require alternative means to top it up, you can bank transfer funds to your PayPal or use PaySafeCard to do so.
Unfortunately we currently do not have a solution for countries where PayPal is blocked by the government, our apologies for that. We can however reveal that our partner Payloadz is looking to support multiple alternative payment gateways some time in 2019.
Thank you so much for supporting ProMods!
