Some want to know if I’ll post it at midnight, or later in the day. First thing you should know, as of right now the hosting solution isn’t even a sure thing.

I have something lined up, but haven’t heard from the guy helping me out in a few days. So I’m not sure about the timing on this. I can’t go into more details on the solution than that yet.

I’ve heard many alternative suggestions and will probably continue to. To field a few of them:

1) I’m not going to host it on youtube. Or render it in video format at all. I don’t want it to be a video. I want it to be Flash. If I thought I was going to end up rendering a video, I would have planned the project for video output accordingly. Perhaps used After Effects. It’s a completely different kind of media. This option is not going to happen.

2) You may “know a guy” with hosting to spare, or such. While it’s a nice thought, there’s a 99.99% chance his server can’t handle it. It’s a big file, and there’ll be upwards of 2 million people looking at it at once. This will use more bandwidth in one day than most high traffic comics use in a year. Sorry, but thanks for the offer.

3) Amazon S3, etc? I’ve looked into a bunch of things like this. It’s expensive. Under usual circumstances, it costs several thousand dollars every month to host MSPA. And I’m fine with floating that cost myself, from ad revenue and sales, and making the business side of things work to sustain it. This is a little different. A conservative estimate has the cost at $10K for one day. This is not considering excessive page reloads, the aftershocks of hosting it for the following weeks, or an unanticipated viral explosion beyond the already high expected traffic. Could be anywhere from $10K to $100K to host this one stupid file, which is bankruptcy territory. It’s not worth that to put out a little free entertainment, frankly. If I posted that kind of content for such an audience every month, I’d find some business strategy to make that work. But I’m not there yet. Also, I’m not gonna do some sort of fund drive to finance this either. I’m sure that would produce some results, but it just doesn’t sit well with me as the answer.

So I’m working on more creative alternatives for handling this. I’ll let you know.

edit: Torrenting, megadownloading, etc are in reserve as last resort plans. It would be more ideal to find a way to run on site though. We’ll see.