Hi,
I’ve developed a little game that I was thinking of putting on-line for free (at least in its early versions). As this is just free stuff (though not public domain), I thought to put it on a download site, rather than having to pay monthly bandwidth fees as I would have to if I kept it on my own site. Thus I’m thinking of using something like CNET downloads or Tucows. Anyone here who has experience with these kind of sites or any recommendations?
Regards,
Michael A.
I recommend you gamejolt, games4j and javagametome. They all support applets. I think miniclip supports applets too but not sure.
The downside of the three first sites though is that they don’t have a lot of traffic yet; games4j and gamejolt are still in beta so I imagine once they leave this state they’ll start advertising a lot more.
Well, I’m probably going to make an installer for this (the main purpose of this game is basically just to test out and experiment with stuff), so I mainly just need somewhere I can redirect my 3 fans to get a download. Not sure if these allow that, but thanks for the recommends.
I’m still happy to receive further recommends, of course. Note: I’m looking for somewhere I can actually store the download files, not to try and get a lot of downloads. 
[Edit: after closer look at the services].
You could use a service like rapid share if you just want to share the files. You could use a free web host if you want to post a couple web pages and offer a download link. The other sites mentioned would be a good way to get a few more fans once your happy with the game.
Thanks for the feedback. I already have a website, but I had forgotten about Rapidshare - certainly looks like a reasonable alternative. Looks like GameJolt also handles storage of files as well, so that would also be an option.
2BeeGames is another portal who host game titles.
I wouldn’t recommend services like Rapidshare, it’ll put off a percentage of your users and when starting out you will want to make every effort you can to make playing your game as easy as possible. That is also why being able to have your game run in the browser is a big plus over a download. I also recommend searching for any small titles you’ve played online, see where they are hosted and talked about. That will probably answer most of this question for you.
Thanks for all the comments.
For anyone else who might be interested in this, I eventually went with GameJolt, as they provide file hosting (up to 100 Mb). For a non applet game, that was my key criteria.
You can put your game jars on a publicly available server like google code, and upload your jnlp file with the svn:mime-type property set as “application/x-java-jnlp-file”.
This makes any link to that file serve as a webstart (google appears to use a apache svn module and that translates the mime into a contenty type).
i recommend google