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Input on decision: file hosting with amazon s3 or similar and php

I appreciate your comments to help me decide on the following.

My requirements:

  • I have a site hosted on a shared server and I'm going to provide content to my users. About 60 GB of content (about 2000 files 30mb each. Users will have access to only 20 files at a time), I calculate about 100 GB monthly bandwidth usage.

  • Once a user registers for the content, links will be accessible for the user to download. But I want the links to expire in 7 days, with the posibility to increase the expiration time.

  • I think that the disk space and bandwidth calls for a service like Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud files (or is there an alternative? )

  • To manage the expiration I plan to somehow obtain links that expire (I think S3 has that feature, not Rackspace) OR control the expiration date on my database and have a batch process that will rename on a daily basis all 200 files on the cloud and on my database (in case a user copied the direct link, it won't work the next day, only my webpage will have the updated links). PHP is used for programming.

So what do you think? Cloud file hosting is the way to go? Which one? Does managing the links makes sense that way or it is too difficult to do that through programming (send commands to the cloud server...)

EDIT: Some host companies have Unlimited space and Bandwidth on their shared plans.. I asked their support staff and they said that they really honor the "unlimited" deal. So 100 GB of transfer a month is ok, the only thing to look out is CPU usage. So going shared hosting is one more alternative to choose from..

FOLLOWUP: So digging more into this I found that the TOS of the Unlimited plans say that it is not permitted to use the space primarily to host multimedia files. So I decided to go with Amazon s3 and the solution provided by Tom Andersen.

Thanks for the input.

Solution

  • You don't have to rename the files on S3 every day. Just make them private (which is default), and hand out time limited urls for day or a week to anyone who is authorized.

    I would consider making the links only good for 20 mins, so that a user has to re-login in order to re-download the files. Then they can't even share the links they get from you.