Options for serving large downloads

[Jason Cartwright]

I have a client requirement to provide DVD images for download. They have a product that ships on multiple DVDs and they want to make it available online as an alternative to shipping physical discs.

So, the challenge I have is that these downloads are protected, so I need them behind authentication. And then the obvious problem is bandwidth. I had originally considered x_sendfile to free up my Rails processes, but if even half their customers download the images it will send our bandwidth through the roof, nevermind the load on the server.

I'm considering Amazon S3, but I'm not sure how I can protect the files from public access without piping them through the webserver. Additionally, the bandwidth could end up costing a couple thousand dollars on S3.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to protect the downloads, minimize the cost of bandwidth and avoid tying up processes with long-running downloads?

[Anthony Eden]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 8:23 AM, Jason Cartwright
<jasoneca...@gmail.com> wrote:

<snuip>

> I'm considering Amazon S3, but I'm not sure how I can protect the files from
> public access without piping them through the webserver. Additionally, the
> bandwidth could end up costing a couple thousand dollars on S3.

S3 does support limited-use time-based tokens, so you can protect them
by having the user go through your site, ask S3 for a time-based token
and then direct the visitor to the URL with that token. You're not
going to get around the bandwidth issue though unless you use
something like BitTorrent, but I'm not sure if you could protect in
that case and you also run into issues with visitors who do not have
BitTorrent.

-Anthony

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http://anthony.mp

[Jason Cartwright]

Anthony,

Thanks for the details. That's essentially the same conclusions I came to, so thanks for confirming.