Options for a disk-hungry client

antic

antic

Perch
I have a client who uploads ~100MB of PDF files each year for their annual meetings, which then get downloaded by attendees. This is starting to take up a lot of space, and the spike in downloads will eventually send my traffic over quota. And I don't want to upgrade my account just for this one client. :)

So I'm wondering if there's a file hosting service out there which could store the files instead of on the client's web site? It would have to offer ~1GB of space and ~10G/month traffic for a reasonable cost, and password-protected downloads (ie. private download links) with no waiting time for downloaders.

Is there such a service?
 
If possible and feasible, you can do simple Value Linux or Silver Linux for them.
 
Thanks Tanmaya. However then they'll look at the account price and see they can get more for less having their own account with you, instead of through a reseller. This is the problem being a reseller, we have to compete with you. :)

tanmaya said:
If possible and feasible, you can do simple Value Linux or Silver Linux for them.
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antic said:
When is that happening? I'm chafing at the bit! :) My Cl1 clients download speed is ~30mb/s, while the migrated Cl2 clients are over 150mb/s. Will it be soon?
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Yes soon, announcement will go out this week :)
 
What about dropbox? The first 2 GB or so is free, especially if you play their games. I have 3 and I'm not eligible for their student and special programs. It gets a bit expensive if you pay for extra space. But more than one person at your client's firm could sign up if they need the extra room.

Dropbox gives you simple, shortened URLs that could be shared with the conference attendees for downloads.
 
skypanther said:
What about dropbox? The first 2 GB or so is free, especially if you play their games. I have 3 and I'm not eligible for their student and special programs. It gets a bit expensive if you pay for extra space. But more than one person at your client's firm could sign up if they need the extra room.

Dropbox gives you simple, shortened URLs that could be shared with the conference attendees for downloads.
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I have a large dropbox account (as I use it to sync between a desktop and 3 laptops in various locaitons), but it. specifically says on mine it is not to be used for 'file sharing' links somewhere on it. It is fine to give a friend or something but not to link on a site for example.
 
skypanther said:
Dropbox gives you simple, shortened URLs that could be shared with the conference attendees for downloads.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that skypanther. Over the past couple of days I've been checking out Amazon S3 and it's *awesome*. You only pay for what you use, when you use it, so it's perfect for this situation where usage spikes like crazy just after the conferences, with nothing much happening in between.

The cool thing about S3 is they allow you to set up a CNAME record for a subdomain which points directly to your S3 bucket! So downloading a file from say "docs.yourdomain.com" actually downloads directly from the S3 servers. That's very very cool. See: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1073

Even better is that you can choose a physical region closest to you. As you'd expect, I found the Singapore region gave the fastest downloads to Perth. Once I knew what to do, it took 5 minutes to set up and works great. No more worries about traffic and disk space overage.

Took longer to work out how to handle members-only files. Check out this article about "pre-signed links". Each link you show to a secure file needs a bit of back-end processing to generate a hash. If the member is signed in, you add a querystring to the link which contains your S3 admin key, an "expires" time for the link, and a HMAC-SHA1 signature. I'm using the AWS SDK for .NET and it only takes a couple of lines of code to generate the secure URL.

So basically you make the link valid for, say, 30 minutes after it's shown on the web page. If the user doesn't click it within that time, they have to refresh the web page to get a fresh link. Alternatively, a fairly simple AJAX routine could refresh all secure links on a page every few minutes (ie. gather all secure links, post to server to get new querystrings for them, replace on page).

I was so excited checking out all this stuff, I was up till 3am. :)
 
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