In our ongoing commitment to provide the best possible service to you, our members, AOA now has two (yes TWO) servers to handle downloads from AOAFiles.

AOA has been allowing downloads to the general public for right at 2 years now, and in that time our traffic has increased substantially, to the point that it is starting to impact our ability to serve our members. Rather than allow that to happen, we have acquired a SECOND server that is solely for handling guests downloading from AOAFiles. What this means to you is the following:

If you are downloading a file from AOA but you are NOT logged in, you will be directed to the secondary AOAFiles server, which resides at DreamHost. If you ARE a logged in user, you will pull your file directly from the main AOAFiles server.  With freshly posted files, there will be a period of time where the file cannot be downloaded by guests, because the systems have not yet had time to sync up.  When this happens, guests attempting to download will receive a message indicating that they need to login to download the file.  As with the main AOAFiles server, attempts to link directly to the file on the secondary server will result in being redirected to the info page for that file.

Doing things this way allows us to ensure that we continue to deliver excellent service to our members and subscribers (especially during heavy traffic periods when popular files are being downloaded), while still filling a need in the larger Internet community.

Guests download from the Secondary file server at a max of 64 KiB/S
Members download from the main file server at a max of 192 KiB/S
Subscribers download from the main file server at the max speed we can send to them. Because of issues with connectivity between us, that may not be at the full speed of their connection, but I can say with considerable confidence that whatever the max speed between us and you may be, we'll fill it.

Don't forget that subscribers, in addition to getting files as fast as we can send them, also get the full width of their browser for viewing AOA (no space lost to side-bar ads), access to the arcade, and other benefits.

If you experience any problems with the new server please let us know.