| does anyone know of a cheap service to order large amounts of data by mail on physical media? I am often interested in some dataset for which I can afford the storage in the form of a hard drive but not in the form of a download through my home connection. If a service existed that simply offered the following: * customer provides URL (and optionally hash checksum) * customer pays, and later receives hard disk drive / SSD drive with the download contained * democratic pricing for the media, or alternatively send your own media (hence at twice media shipping cost...) * possibly eventually local brick and mortar locations / affiliate locations to drop off and pick up media, in the larger cities * preferably without account, although an account is not a large impediment * definitely not coupled to a financial account in a credit fashion, i.e. no qualms with topping up the account, but the service should not be able to withdraw money from my financial account. i.e. debit only (like the typical european bank cards, yes I know credit cards are available in europe as well...) This would seem like a profitable side business for many programmer types who have high bandwidth connections (or have access to them and are allowed to use the connection for this purpouse). If someone builds the software stack for a main portal such that affiliates can advertise their physical location, and their pricing for media, for download and for copying to media, then customers could compare and choose on the basis of price. |
1TB HDD: 59 AUD International Shipping (assuming we can keep it under 1kg with packaging): 38 AUD
That is 97 AUD before considering any profit you might want to make (35 AUD for the movie + small popcorn and drink), fixed setup costs like a NAS to cache data sets or the bandwidth costs.