Download problem with Amazon S3

We were using the amazon s3 plugin in the past, but woocommerce supports amazon urls natively now.
so in the product download url when setting up the product, we just stick the whole url to the file on amazon and it works.

When woocommerce first started supporting it like this, we had trouble and removed the amazon s3 plugin completely.

I hope this helps.

But what about security? I need to restrict access to authenticated users and also hide the url from browsers etc.

They should not still sell the plugin if it is not working correctly or is redundent.

it has built in encryption, so if you are selling (or giving it away as a price of 0), it will encrypt the link and send the user an email with an encrypted link, never revealing the actual location of the file.

If the users are members, they get the links in the my account page aswell, also encrypted.

And I agree, I don’t know why they are selling that plugin still, that is why I was confused as to the setup once woocommerce went to 2.0… But it said it in the woocommerce docs that it is supported natively now.

Benbodhi, just to clarify – you’re saying that the S3 plugin is no longer needed to serve downloadable products from S3 buckets, correct? Are you serving very large files on your site? If so, have you had any customers report downloads stopping? In several months, I’ll be starting this type of site; products (videos) are of course large files and I just want to make sure that this technology is solid before moving forward.

Hi MDC2957,

Correct, Woocommerce has a built in URL field that can accept S3 URL’s now ??

We don’t use amazon anymore, we have our own dedicated server, but we were serving files up to 18GB. There was the odd user that had trouble downloading the complete file (less than 1% of users) but I found that you can change the settings in Woocommerce to do with force download / send xfile, this could eliminate that issue. We moved away from amazon before testing that too much though.

I think you’ll be happy considering it all works well out of the box and is a free plugin. The large file issue was the only one and as mentioned, I’m sure playing with the send xfile settings will sort that out.

Good Luck

Thanks for the reply. What caused the move to a dedicated server if Amazon’s storage and bandwidth costs are so low?

We made that decision based on a number of factors:
– our content on our own server just seems more private and secure
– speed – uploading (for us) and downloading (for clients)
– the costs actually were not that low after 2 years of use, we have so much content, it worked out better to use our own server price wise (it is only $9 per month to add another TB of storage at any point we need it).
– allows us to run multiple cPanel hosting accounts from the one server.
– We also run a hosting company, so we can provision accounts and run our own all from the one place – simplicity.

The overall costs for our hosting accounts, domain names and amazon storage was closely comparable to dedicated server solutions, so we made the move. In saying that, we have a pretty intense server that serves the files quicker than I ever experienced from amazon (which actually surprised me) that we can still make faster in terms of connection, upload and download speed and can keep scaling up comfortably as we grow.

There was probably other factors involved but mainly unrelated to the actual serving of our large video files. We just wanted speed, security, simplicity, control and scalability.

Wow yeah, I don’t run a hosting company or have any needs like that. You mentioned the cost to add another TB of storage, but what about the cost of bandwidth on a dedicated server? I would think that’s where the cost difference would occur between S3 and a traditional web hosting account?

We have a ridiculous amount of bandwidth aswell, when it comes to space and bandwidth, it turned out cheaper for us at the same time as super beneficial.
I can’t remember what our bandwidth stats actually are, but we are not even close. The site that we have all the large videos on can be around 10000 visits a week, and for quite some time a lot of content was free, so there would have been soooo much being downloaded.
But our server is only at about 3% of its capability right now (bandwidth wise) – plenty of room to move ??

I’m trying to figure out if I would even need a dedicated host or not.. If many people are downloading files from my website via S3, does that put extra strain on my webhost, or is it all handled by Amazon?

When using S3, all of the strain will be on amazon servers, all your site will be doing is standard email sending with the encrypted links really, a standard shared hosting account can handle it no worries.
A shared hosting account would handle serving the files yourself, but as we learned early on, they tell you its “unlimited” bandwidth and space… but when you actually start to use a lot, they complain and warn you to decrease usage and the amount of content stored on their server as it compromises other shared accounts performance. They threatened to close our shared account on a number of occasions, usually at 20GB of content… That’s when we moved to amazon for large files.
But as mentioned, we have gone another step since then.
Amazon is cheap enough to start with, I would say to start out with them and see how you like it and how much it ends up costing as they charge variably based on space used and how much traffic goes through, so it is a different price each month.

Oh yes, I’m familiar with the unlimited pitch. That’s my concern, it’s more about the number of people simultaneously buying and downloading files, if that has any impact on the web host, or it’s still all on Amazon.

Yeh, all amazon, your host will only do the standard email send with the links… when they click the links, the content will be served from amazon.

Ok thank you, that’s what I wanted to know, appreciate the help!